THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


FROM  THE  LIBRARY  OF 
ERNEST  CARROLL  MOORE 


babbitt 


THE  MASTERS  OF  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM. 
THE    NEW    LAOKOON. 

An  Essay  on  the  Confusion  of  the  Arts. 
LITERATURE  AND  THE  AMERICAN  COLLEGE. 

Essays  in  Defense  of  the  Humanities. 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 


THE  MASTERS  OF 
MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 


THE 

MASTERS  OF  MODERN 
FRENCH  CRITICISM 


BY 


IRVING   BABBITT 

Professor  of  French  Literature 
in  Harvard  University 


BOSTON   AND  NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

Cbe  ttiticrrfiOe  prtas  Cambridge 
1912 


COPYRIGHT,    1912,   BY   IRVING  BABBITT 
ALL    RIGHTS    RESERVED 

Published  December  IQ12 


College 
Library 

Pa 


"  La  critique  univ&rselle  est  le  seul  caractere 
qu'on  puisse  assigner  a  la  pensee  delicate, 
fuyante,  insaisissable  du  XIXe  siecle." 

RENAN. 


1326910 


PREFACE 

WHAT  I  have  tried  to  do  in  this  volume  is  not  to 
criticise  criticism,  at  best  a  somewhat  languid  business, 
but  to  criticise  critics,  which  may  be  a  far  more  legiti- 
mate task,  especially  if  the  critics  happen  to  be,  as  in 
the  present  case,  among  the  most  vital  and  significant 
personalities  of  their  time.  Matthew  Arnold  speaks  in 
one  of  his  sonnets  of  "  France,  famed  in  all  great  arts, 
in  none  supreme."  Yet  elsewhere  he  accords  to  Sainte- 
Beuve  a  supremacy  in  the  art  of  criticism  of  the  same 
order  as  that  of  Homer  in  poetry.  That  Arnold  was  the 
last  man  to  underestimate  a  supremacy  of  this  kind  we 
may  infer  from  the  familiar  sentence  in  his  essay  on 
translating  Homer:  "Of  the  literature  of  France  and 
Germany,  as  of  the  intellect  of  Europe  in  general,  the 
main  effort,  for  now  many  years,  has  been  a  critical 
effort." 

To  study  Sainte-Beuve  and  the  other  leading  French 
critics  of  the  nineteenth  century  is  therefore  to  get  very 
close  to  the  intellectual  centre  of  the  century.  We  may 
thus  follow  the  main  movement  of  thought  through  this 
period  and  at  the  same  time  build  up  the  necessary 
background  for  the  proper  understanding  of  the  ideas 
of  our  own  day,  whether  they  continue  this  earlier 
thought  or  react  from  it. 

The  so-called  anti-intellectualist  movement  of  the 
present  time  especially  can  only  be  understood  with 


viii  PREFACE 

reference  to  such  a  background;  it  is  a  reaction  from 
the  dogmatic  naturalism  that  reached  its  height  in  the 
second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  a  sign  that  the 
world  is  growing  weary  of  scientific  positivism  and  its 
attempt  to  lock  up  reality  in  its  formulae.  The  walls  of 
that  particular  prison  house  of  the  spirit  are  plainly 
crumbling.  Parts  of  the  edifice  have  been  collapsing  of 
late  with  almost  dramatic  suddenness.  We  must  rid  our- 
selves of  all  forms  of  the  metaphysical  illusion  (including 
the  scientific  form),  says  M.  Bergson,  perhaps  the  chief 
spokesman  of  the  new  tendency,  and  so  make  philosophy 
vital.  This  attempt  of  philosophy  to  escape  from  mere 
intellectualism  is  in  itself  highly  laudable.  With  the 
older  type  of  metaphysician  ordinary  mortals  felt  that 
they  had  very  little  in  common.  They  could  at  most 
address  to  him  the  Virgilian  query :  — 

"  Quid  struis  ?  aut  qua  spe  gelidis  in  nubibus  haeres  ?  " 

But  the  philosophers  have  of  late  been  coming  out  of 
their  chilling  clouds  of  abstraction.  They  have  been 
growing  literary,  so  literary,  in  fact,  that  the  time  would 
seem  to  have  arrived  for  the  men  of  letters  to  return 
the  compliment  and  become  to  the  best  of  their  ability 
philosophical. 

The  literary  critic  especially  should  be  willing  to  meet 
the  philosopher  halfway,  if  it  be  true,  as  I  have  tried  to 
show  in  this  volume,  that  they  are  both  confronted  at 
present  by  the  same  central  problem.  For,  to  inquire 
whether  the  critic  can  judge,  and  if  so  by  what  stand- 
ards, is  only  a  form  of  the  more  general  inquiry 


PREFACE  ix 

whether  the  philosopher  can  discover  any  unifying 
principle  to  oppose  to  mere  flux  and  relativity.  We 
are  told  by  the  new  school  that  any  attempt  on  the 
part  of  the  intellect  to  unify  life  and  impose  upon  it  a 
scale  of  values  is  artificial,  and  that  we  must  oppose  to 
this  artificial  unity  our  vivid  intuitions  of  change,  of 
the  infinite  otherwiseness  of  things.  Now,  however  little 
we  may  accept  the  whole  of  this  thesis,  we  must  grant 
that  M.  Bergson  —  and  James,  as  it  seems  to  me,  even 
more  than  M.  Bergson  —  has  rendered  a  substantial 
service  to  philosophy  in  thus  turning  its  attention  to 
what  Plato  would  have  called  the  problem  of  the  One 
and  the  Many.  Most  people,  James  admits,  do  not  lose 
much  sleep  over  this  problem,  yet  he  is  right  in  think- 
ing that  all  other  philosophical  problems  are  insignifi- 
cant in  comparison.  If  philosophy  once  gets  firmly 
planted  on  this  ground,  it  may  recover  a  reality  that  it 
has  scarcely  possessed  since  the  debates  of  Socrates  and 
the  sophists.  Instead  of  the  intricate  fence  with  blunted 
foils  to  which  the  intellectualists  have  too  often  re- 
duced it,  we  may  once  more  see  the  flash  of  the  naked 
blade. 

In  their  dealings  with  the  problem  of  the  One  and 
the  Many,  both  M.  Bergson  and  James  have  adopted, 
it  would  seem  sufficiently  plain,  not  the  Socratic  but 
the  sophistical  side  of  the  argument.  I  have  expressed 
my  own  conviction  in  the  following  pages  that  what  is 
needed  just  now  is  not  merely  a  reaction  from  scientific 
positivism  (that  we  are  getting  already),  but  a  reaction 
from  naturalism  itself.  By  this  I  mean  that  we  should 


*  PREFACE 

effect  our  escape  from  intellectualism  not  by  sinking 
below  it,  after  the  fashion  of  the  Bergsonians  and  prag- 
matists,  but  by  rising  above  it,  and  this  would  involve 
in  turn  a  use  of  the  Socratic  and  Platonic  method  of 
definition.  Instead  of  reducing  the  intellect  to  a  purely 
utilitarian  role,  as  M.  Bergson  does,  we  should  employ 
it  in  multiplying  sharp  distinctions,  and  should  then 
put  these  distinctions  into  the  service  of  the  character 
and  will.  If  we  are  told  that  in  order  to  get  at  reality 
we  must  abandon  intellect  for  intuition,  the  obvious 
reply  is  that  only  by  means  of  the  intellect  can  we  lay 
the  proper  foundations  for  a  philosophy  of  intuition. 
In  short,  the  word  intuition  itself  is  very  much  in  need 
of  being  treated  Socratically.  If  I  have  contributed  even 
in  a  small  degree  to  dissipate  the  dangerous  sophistries 
that  are  accumulating  so  rapidly  around  this  word  in 
contemporary  thought,  I  shall  be  satisfied.  I  have  tried 
to  show,  especially  in  the  essays  on  Joubert  and  Taine, 
that  the  term  intuition  is  not  simple  but  complex,  that 
there  are  different  orders  of  intuitions.  Good  sense  itself, 
according  to  Dr.  Johnson,  is  intuitive,  and  this  is  a  kind 
of  intuitiveness  of  which  we  stand  in  special  need  at  the 
present  crisis ;  for  this  word  is  not  too  strong  to  apply  to 
a  time  when  the  philosophy  of  the  flux  is  proclaimed  so 
confidently  and  received  with  so  much  applause.  This 
same  naturalistic  vertigo,  we  may  remember,  seized  upon 
ancient  Greek  society  at  the  very  height  of  its  achieve- 
ment and  marked  the  first  downward  step  towards  the 
abyss.  "Too  many  of  our  modern  philosophers  in  their 
search  after  the  nature  of  things,"  says  Plato  in  words 


PREFACE  xi 

that  might  have  been  written  yesterday,  "are  always 
getting  dizzy  from  constantly  going  round  and  round ; 
and  then  .  .  .  they  think  that  there  is  nothing  stable 
or  permanent,  but  only  flux  and  motion,  and  that  the 
world  is  full  of  every  sort  of  motion  and  change." 

I  have  just  said  that  to  study  the  chief  French 
critics  of  the  nineteenth  century  is  to  get  very  close 
to  the  intellectual  centre  of  the  age.  I  am  of  the  belief, 
however  little  I  may  have  justified  it  by  my  practice, 
that  this  question  of  the  One  and  the  Many,  on  which 
all  the  other  main  aspects  of  our  modern  thought  finally 
converge,  may  be  studied  to  special  advantage  in  con- 
nection with  these  critics.  I  have  aimed,  however,  to 
estimate  the  work  of  each  critic  in  itself  and  not  to 
study  it  simply  as  part  of  an  intellectual  development. 
To  this  end  I  have  made  a  very  liberal  use  of  quotation, 
on  the  principle  laid  down  by  Sainte-Beuve :  Avec  des 
citations  bien  prises  on  trouverait  dans  chaque  auteur 
son  propre  jugement.  In  such  a  way  one  may  stand 
aside  and  let  the  authors  speak  for  themselves. 

CAMBRIDGE,  MASS., 
November  1,  1912. 


CONTENTS 

PREFACE vii 

I.  MADAME  DE  STAEL       ......  1 

II.  JOUBEBT 34 

III.  CHATEAUBRIAND 60 

IV.  THE  TRANSITION  TO  SAINTE-BEUVE  (Cousin  —  Ville- 

main  —  Nisard) 79 

V.  SAINTE-BEUVE  (before  1848)        ....  97 

VI.   SAINTE-BEUVE  (after  1848) 129 

VH.   SCHERER 189 

VIII.  TAINE 218 

IX.   RENAN 257 

X.  BRUNETIERE 298 

XI.  CONCLUSION 338 

LIST  OF  CRITICS 393 

INDEX  421 


THE  MASTEES  OF  MODEEN 
FEENOH  CEITICISM 


MADAME   DE   STAEL 

THE  first  year  of  the  nineteenth  century  was  appro- 
priately marked  by  the  publication  of  Madame  de  Stael's 
"  Literature  considered  in  its  Relations  to  Social  Insti- 
tutions." This  relationship  between  literature  and  society 
upon  which  the  new  century  was  to  insist  more  than  any 
previous  century  had  been  forced  upon  its  notice  by  the 
very  suddenness  of  its  separation  from  the  past.  As 
Stendhal  was  to  say  later:  "How  could  you  expect  a 
man  who  had  been  on  the  retreat  from  Moscow  to  care 
for  literature  written  for  the  men  who  had  taken  off 
their  hats  at  Fontenoy  to  the  English  column  and  said, 
'Fire  first,  gentlemen'?"  "Nothing  in  life  should 
be  stationary,"  wrote  Madame  de  Stae'l  in  the  "  Ger- 
many," "and  art  is  petrified  when  it  no  longer  changes. 
Twenty  years  of  revolution  have  given  the  imagina- 
tion other  needs  than  those  it  felt  when  the  novels  of 
Crebillon  portrayed  the  love  and  society  of  the  time." 1 
Chateaubriand,  at  variance  with  Madame  de  Stae'l  on  so 
many  other  points,  agreed  with  her  that  men's  charac- 

1  De  I'Allemagne,  2"  Partie,  c.  xv. 


2  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ters  had  been  profoundly  transformed  by  the  Revolution 
and  that  literature  should  reflect  this  transformation. 

We  should  err,  however,  in  supposing  that  the  pub- 
lic in  general  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  cent- 
ury felt  the  need  of  changes  in  art  and  literature  to 
express  a  changed  society.  The  Empire  as  a  whole  was 
a  period  of  artificiality  and  formalism.  This  would  seem 
less  strange  if  those  who  had  learned  nothing  and  for- 
gotten nothing  politically  had  alone  shown  zeal  in  main- 
taining the  Old  Regime  in  literature.  On  the  contrary, 
the  men  who  had  innovated  most  rashly  in  other  ways 
were  often  conspicuous  for  their  literary  conservatism. 
Men  who  had  toppled  over  altars  and  beheaded  a  king 
were  ready  to  kneel  down  superstitiously  in  the  little 
Temple  of  Taste ; l  like  Byron  who,  according  to  Goethe, 
showed  no  respect  for  any  law  human  or  divine  except 
the  law  of  the  three  unities.  An  occasional  writer  who 
felt  a  new  spirit  stirring  vaguely  within  him,  and  set 
out  to  be  original,  only  succeeded  in  becoming  odd. 
Thus  Nepomucene  Lemercier  (Nepomucene  le  Bizarre), 
after  precipitating  a  bloody  riot  by  the  liberties  he 
took  with  the  unities  and  verbal  decorum  in  his  play 
"Christophe  Colomb,"  afterwards  declared  in  his  "Cours 
de  litterature,"  that  a  tragedy  must  fulfil  precisely 
twenty-six  rules2  or  conditions  under  penalty  of  ceasing 
to  be. 

The  society  of  the  Empire,  made  up  as  it  was  largely 

1  Cf .  G.  Merlet,  Tableau  de  la  Litterature  fran^aise,  1800-1815,  in,  21. 
8  Cours  analytique  de  litterature  generale  (1817),  1, 179.  Comedy  must 
observe  twenty-two  rules,  epic  twenty-three. 


MADAME   DE   STAEL  3 

of  parvenus  and  of  persons  whose  education  had  been 
broken  off  abruptly  by  the  Revolution,  was  almost 
naively  willing  to  be  schoolmastered.  It  wished  to  get 
on  the  easiest  terms  that  tincture  of  humane  literature 
that  was  deemed  necessary  not  only  to  good  taste  but  to 
good  breeding.  Hence  no  doubt  the  popularity  during 
the  first  twenty  or  thirty  years  of  the  century  of  the 
"  Lycee  "  of  La  Harpe,  the  last  eminent  critical  author- 
ity of  the  Old  Regime ;  for  no  one  was  better  fitted  than 
he  to  give  a  first  general  initiation  into  literary  tradi- 
tion. Sainte-Beuve  calls  the  critics  of  the  Empire  the 
small  change  of  Boileau  —  Boileau,  conceived,  of  course, 
after  the  late  neo-classical  fashion,  as  the  policeman  of 
Parnassus,  the  vigilant  guardian  of  literary  orthodoxy. 
Sainte-Beuve  points  out  that  they  had  not  only  the  limit- 
ations but  the  merits  of  the  older  type  of  critics  :  they 
were  preeminently  judicial.  They  felt  themselves  sup- 
ported, moreover,  in  their  judgments  by  a  public  opinion 
that  had  grown  weary  of  the  chaos  and  anarchy  of  the 
Revolution,  and  are  even  less  important  in  themselves 
than  as  the  mouthpieces  of  this  opinion.1 

Geoffroy,  the  representative  critic  of  the  period,  was 
fitted  by  his  past  to  play  the  pedagogue.  He  had  been 
professor  of  "  eloquence"  at  Paris  before  the  Revolution 
and  taught  school  in  the  village  where  he  concealed 
himself  during  the  Terror.  Geoffroy,  however,  cannot 
be  dismissed  as  a  mere  political  and  literary  reactionary, 
though  in  a  sense  he  was  both.  He  makes  frequent  use 
of  the  historic  method  and  is  guided  in  his  actual  judg- 

1  See  the  whole  article  in  Causeries  du  Lundi,  i,  371  ff. 


4  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ments  even  more  by  vigorous  good-sense  than  by  a  re- 
gard for  formal  requirements.  At  the  age  of  fifty-eight, 
he  created  a  new  genre,  the  dramatic  feuilleton,  and 
for  twelve  years  ruled  the  playwrights  and  actors  of  his 
time  with  a  rod  of  iron.  Like  Jeffrey,  with  whom  he 
has  been  compared,  he  belongs  only  partly  to  the  old 
critical  order  by  his  method,  but  entirely  to  it  by  his 
temper,  which  was  hard,  imperious,  and  vituperative. 
According  to  an  epigram,  he  died  as  a  result  of  having 
sucked  inadvertently  the  tip  of  his  own  pen.1  His  vio- 
lence, like  that  of  his  opponents,  is  due  to  the  same 
poisonous  intrusion  of  politics  into  literature  that  one 
finds  at  about  the  same  time  in  England.  No  wonder 
that  a  man  who  has  to  repel  almost  daily  charges  of 
venality  and  gluttony  should  in  the  long  run  become 
pugilistic.  Quite  apart  from  politics,  however,  Geoffrey 
believed  in  the  virtues  of  la  critique  amere  ;  and  some- 
thing may  as  a  matter  of  fact  be  said  in  behalf  of  a  tonic 
bitterness  in  criticism.  Unfortunately,  he  not  only  flour- 
ished the  ferule  too  openly,  but  had  against  him  the 
deeper  currents  of  his  time.  He  stood  at  most  for  a 
minor  movement  of  concentration  in  an  age  which  was 
in  its  underlying  tendency  expansive,  and  which,  caring 
little  for  discipline,  aspired  towards  a  vast  widening  out 
of  knowledge  and  sympathy.  Of  this  underlying  ex- 
pansive tendency  the  true  representative  is  Madame  de 
Stael. 

1  "  Nous  venous  de  perdre  Geoffrey. 

—  II  est  mort  ?  —  Ce  soir,  on  1'inhume. 

De  quel  mal  ?  —  Je  ne  sais  —  Je  le  devine,  moi  ; 

L'imprudent,  par  me'garde,  aura  suce'  sa  plume." 


MADAME  DE   STAEL 


It  has  been  said  that  the  role  of  Madame  de  Stael 
was  to  understand  and  make  others  understand,  that  of 
Chateaubriand  to  feel  and  teach  others  to  feel;  which 
is  only  another  way  of  saying  that  Chateaubriand  is 
more  intimately  related  to  romanticism  than  Madame  de 
Stael.  That  "  unnatural  amount  of  understanding  "  in 
Madame  de  Stael  of  which  Schiller  complained  sets  her 
off  sharply  from  the  romanticists  and  connects  her 
with  the  eighteenth  century.  Her  style  is  of  that  age ; 
it  lacks,  however,  the  epigrammatic  neatness  of  the 
eighteenth  century  before  Rousseau,  and  though  not 
always  free  from  the  sentimentality  and  declamation 
that  the  late  eighteenth  century  had  caught  from  Rous- 
seau at  his  worst,  it  lacks  the  imaginative  freshness  and 
warmth  of  coloring  of  Rousseau  at  his  best.  It  has  its 
own  merits  as  a  medium  for  conveying  ideas,  but  it  is 
deficient  in  both  the  old  art  and  the  new  poetry. 

Madame  de  Stael  belongs  no  less  decisively  to  the 
Old  Regime  in  preferring  society  to  nature  and  solitude. 
Napoleon,  in  his  ten  years'  duel  with  her,  discovered  that 
he  could  inflict  sufficient  torment  simply  by  keeping 
her  at  a  distance  from  Paris.  She  was  especially  impa- 
tient with  those  who  suggested  that  she  had  a  compen- 
sation for  her  enforced  absence  from  the  capital  in  the 
panorama  of  the  Alps  that  unfolded  itself  before  her 
at  Coppet.  She  spent  years  in  the  presence  of  this 
panorama,  as  has  been  pointed  out,  without  receiving 
from  it  the  suggestion  of  a  single  image.  However,  her 
often  quoted  remark  that  she  would  travel  five  hundred 


6  MODEKN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

leagues  to  meet  a  man  of  parts,  but  would  not  open  her 
window  to  look  at  the  Bay  of  Naples,  gives  a  somewhat 
exaggerated  idea  of  her  indifference  to  nature. 

In  spite  of  her  excess  of  understanding,  her  love  of 
the  drawing-room  and  her  comparative  coolness  towards 
nature,  Madame  de  Stael  is  nevertheless  a  disciple  of 
Rousseau.  We  merely  need  to  define  carefully  this  dis- 
cipleship.  She  might  have  said,  though  in  a  somewhat 
different  sense  from  Rousseau,  that  "  her  heart  and  her 
head  did  not  seem  to  belong  to  the  same  individual." 
Like  Renan  she  was  fond  of  attributing  the  conflict  of 
which  she  was  conscious  in  herself  to  a  mixed  heredity. 
"  To  be  born  a  French  woman,"  she  says,  "  with  a  for- 
eign character,  with  French  taste  and  habits  and  the 
ideas  and  feelings  of  the  North,  is  a  contrast  that 
wrecks  one's  life." 1  In  the  "  Germany  "  Madame  de 
Stael  says  that  Rousseau  introduced  an  alien  element 
into  French  literature,  an  element  that  is  Northern  and 
Germanic.  Now  the  element  that  Madame  de  Stael  con- 
ceived to  be  common  to  Rousseau  and  herself  and  at 
the  same  time  to  distinguish  the  Germans,  manifests  it- 
self especially  in  the  power  of  "  enthusiasm."  She  is,  then, 
not  only  temperamentally  an  enthusiast,  but  also  an 
enthusiast  by  the  direct  influence  of  Rousseau  as  well 
as  by  the  Rousseauism  that  she  received  from  Germany. 

The  more  we  study  the  literary  revolution  at  the  be- 
ginning of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  more  it  becomes 
plain  that  everything  hinges  on  the  word  enthusiasm. 
The  romantic  movement  in  its  modern  phase  is  even 

1  Letter  to  Friederike  Bran,  July  15,  1806. 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  7 

more  a  renascence  of  enthusiasm  than  a  renascence  of 
wonder,  or  rather  wonder  itself  is  only  one  aspect  of 
the  new  enthusiasm.  The  process  by  which  the  word 
enthusiasm  itself  changed  in  the  course  of  the  eighteenth 
century  from  a  bad  to  a  good  meaning,  by  which  the 
enthusiast  and  original  genius  supplanted  the  wit  and 
man  of  the  world,  is  one  of  the  most  important  in  liter- 
ary history  and  can  scarcely  be  traced  too  carefully. 

Illuminating  passages  on  the  nature  of  the  new  e.n- 
thusiasm  and  at  the  same  time  on  Madame  de  StaeTs 
relationship  to  Rousseau  will  be  found  in  her  very  youth- 
ful "  Letters  on  the  Writings  and  Character  of  Jean- 
Jacques  Rousseau."  "  Is  it  not  in  our  youth,"  she 
exclaims  in  the  preface  to  that  work,  "  that  we  owe  the 
most  gratitude  to  Rousseau,  to  the  man  who  succeeded 
in  making  a  passion  of  virtue,  who  wished  to  convince  by 
enthusiasm  and  made  use  of  the  good  qualities  and  even 
the  faults  of  youth  to  render  himself  its  master."  Else- 
where she  says  that  "  he  invented  nothing  but  set 
everything  afire  " l  — even  to  the  point  it  would  appear 
of  setting  virtue  afire.  Virtue  thus  becomes  an  involun- 
tary impulse,  a  "  noble  enthusiasm,"  a  "  movement  which 
passes  into  the  blood  and  sweeps  you  along  irresistibly 
like  the  most  imperious  passions." 2  In  other  words,  for 
Madame  de  Stael  as  for  Rousseau,  virtue  is  a  mere  process 
of  emotional  expansion,  related  to  the  region  of  impulse 
below  the  reason  rather  than  to  the  region  of  insight 
above  it.  Rousseau  and  his  followers  introduce  universal 

1  De  la  Litterature,  1*  Partie,  c.  xx. 
*  Discours  preliminaire  de  la  Litterature. 


8  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

confusion  into  morality,  as  Joubert  says,  by  thus  con- 
ceiving of  virtue  not  as  a  bridle  but  as  a  spur.  Of  Ma- 
dame de  Stael  in  particular,  he  said  that  she  had  a  native 
ethical  gift  which  was  corrupted  by  her  notion  of  en- 
thusiasm. "  She  took  the  fevers  of  the  soul  for  its  endow- 
ments, intoxication  for  a  power,  and  our  aberrations  for 
a  progress.  The  passions  became  in  her  eyes  a  species 
of  dignity  and  glory." 1 

It  would  not,  however,  be  entirely  fair  to  Madame  de 
Stael  to  see  in  her  conception  of  morality  a  mere  Rous- 
seauistic  intoxication.  The  two  ruling  passions  of  her 
life  were  hatred  of  Napoleon  and  love  for  her  father, 
and  as  she  grew  older  she  showed  herself  more  and  more 
not  merely  the  daughter  but  the  disciple  of  Necker. 
Both  her  rationalism  and  her  emotionalism  were  tempered 
by  the  traditional  views  of  morality  and  religion  of  the 
Swiss  protestant.  In  her  political  thinking  again,  both 
on  her  own  account  and  as  a  follower  of  her  father,  she 
departed  from  Rousseau  in  putting  her  chief  emphasis 
on  liberty.  In  the  very  passage  where  she  says  that 
Rousseau  invented  nothing  but  set  everything  afire,  she 
goes  on  to  say  that  "  the  sentiment  of  equality  which  pro- 
duces many  more  storms  than  the  love  of  liberty,  and 
which  causes  questions  to  arise  of  a  quite  different  order, 
—  the  sentiment  of  equality  in  its  greatness  as  well  as 
in  its  pettiness  stands  out  in  every  line  of  Rousseau's 
writings."  Rousseau  was  nearer  to  the  French  in  this 
respect  than  Madame  de  Stael.  In  making  the  love 
of  liberty  the  mainspring  of  the  Revolution,  she  was 
1  Pensees,  387  (Edition  Paul  de  Raynal,  1866). 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  9 

under  more  illusions  about  the  French  character  than 
Napoleon,  who  knew  that  the  deeper  craving  of  the 
French  was  for  equality,  even  equality  under  a  despot. 
Rousseauistic  enthusiasm  remains  after  all  the  essen- 
tial aspect  of  Madame  de  StaeTs  genius.  She  differs 
however  from  many  of  the  posterity  of  Jean-Jacques 
in  being  intellectually  as  well  as  emotionally  expansive. 
In  so  far  as  she  desired  only  expansiveness  and  refused 
either  an  inner  or  an  outer  check,  she  was  unbalanced 
and  did  not  escape  the  Nemesis  that  pursues  every  form 
of  lack  of  balance,  especially,  perhaps,  lack  of  emotional 
balance.  Yet  it  may  be  said  in  her  behalf  that  the  half- 
truths  on  which  she  insisted  were  the  half-truths  that 
the  age  needed  to  hear,  and  that  the  excess  by  which 
she  erred  was  —  in  spite  of  the  charges  of  masculinity 
brought  against  her  by  her  contemporaries 1  —  the  ex- 
cess of  the  feminine  virtues.  She  really  had  the  large- 
ness and  generosity  of  outlook  that  her  theory  required, 
and  hers  was  above  all  a  magnificently  hospitable  nature. 
The  welcome  that  she  extended  at  Coppet  to  visitors  from 
the  ends  of  Europe  symbolizes  fitly  the  breadth  of  her 
intellectual  hospitality.  She  was  cosmopolitan  not  only 
in  the  influences  she  received  but  in  those  she  radiated. 
As  Napoleon  complained,  she  taught  people  to  think  to 
whom  it  would  never  otherwise  have  occurred  to  do  so. 

1  Madame  de  Stael  was  supposed  to  have  portrayed  herself  in  the  char- 
acter of  Delphine  and  at  the  same  time  to  have  satirized  Talleyrand  in 
the  character  of  Madame  de  Vernon  ;  whereupon  Talleyrand  remarked 
that  he  understood  she  had  written  a  novel  in  which  both  he  and  she 
appeared  disguised  as  women. 


10  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ii 

Any  one  who  conceives  of  life  as  expansively  as  did 
Madame  de  Stael,  comes  inevitably  to  be  interested  less 
in  form  than  in  expression.  The  partisan  of  form  is  fas- 
tidious and  exclusive,  whether  his  sense  of  form  rests  on 
a  living  intuition  or  on  the  acceptance  of  certain  tradi- 
tional standards.  Now  Madame  de  Stael  almost  entirely 
lacked  the  living  intuition  of  form  and  had  repudiated 
the  traditional  standards.  She  was  led  by  her  interest  in 
expression  to  exalt  the  variable  element  in  literature,  to 
see  it  not  absolutely  but  relatively;  above  all,  as  we  have 
seen,  to  look  on  it  as  the  expression  of  society  and  there- 
fore as  changing  with  it.  Saint-Evremond  had  opposed 
a  keen  sense  of  historical  relativity  to  the  overweening 
faith  of  the  age  of  Louis  XIV  in  the  fixity  and  finality 
of  its  own  standards.  But  Madame  de  Stael  did  not  get 
her  historical  sense  from  Saint-Evremond,  so  far  as  she 
may  be  said  to  have  had  one  at  all  at  the  time  of  writing 
her  book  on  Literature;  it  is  rather  a  development  of 
what  is  already  in  germ  in  Rousseau.  For  Rousseau, 
unhistorical  as  he  was  in  many  respects,  treated  one 
of  the  literary  forms,  the  drama,  from  the  relative  and 
expressionistic  point  of  view.  In  the  "  Letter  to  D' Alem- 
bert "  he  maintains  that  the  only  possible  kind  of  play 
is  the  problem  play ;  furthermore  that  the  dramatist  is 
not  free  to  choose  his  problem,  but  has  it  imposed  upon 
him  by  the  taste  of  his  country  and  time.1  Thus  the 

1  "  A  Londres,  un  drame  intdresse  en  faisant  hair  les  Frangais;  a  Tunis 
la  belle  passion  serait  la  piraterie  ;  a  Messine,  une  vengeance  bien  savour- 
euse  ;  a  Goa,  1'honneur  de  bruler  les  Juifs." 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  11 

"(Edipus  Rex"  did  not  succeed  because  of  its  absolute 
human  appeal,  but  because  it  expressed  the  taste  of  an 
Athenian  audience  of  the  fifth  century  B.C.  If  it  were 
put  on  the  stage  to-day  it  would  infallibly  fall  flat. 
Curiously  enough  Saint-Evremond  made  precisely  the 
same  use  of  the  same  illustration,  and  both  Saint-Evre- 
mond and  Rousseau  would  seem  to  have  been  convicted 
of  error  by  recent  successful  revivals  of  the  (Edipus  as 
an  acting  play. 

The  use  of  the  historical  method  in  the  book  on  "  Lit- 
erature "  is  much  obscured  by  the  utterly  unhistorical 
conception  of  perfectibility,  that  faith  in  a  mechanical 
and  rectilinear  advance  of  the  human  race  which  so 
many  people  still  hold  naively,  imagining  themselves 
to  be  evolutionists.  Madame  de  Stael  assumes  the  su- 
periority of  Roman  over  Greek  philosophy  simply  be- 
cause it  comes  later.  She  was  at  least  led  in  this  way  to 
suspect  something  of  value  in  those  mediaeval  centuries 
which  La  Harpe  had  dismissed  as  mere  "  chaos  and 
night." 

We  find  in  the  "  Literature,"  along  with  many  other 
passages  that  anticipate  at  least  faintly  the  "  Germany," 
the  first  form  of  the  celebrated  distinction  between  the 
two  literatures,  that  of  the  North  and  that  of  the  South 
(she  does  not  however  as  yet  apply  to  the  former  the 
epithet  romantic).  She  shows  the  limitations  both  of  her 
taste  and  of  her  historic  sense  when,  after  deriving  the 
southern  or  Grseco-Roman  tradition  ultimately  from 
Homer,  she  seeks  for  the  headwaters  of  the  northern 
literatures  in  Ossian !  This  love  of  Ossian  was  one 


12  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

of  the  few  things  she  had  in  common  with  Napoleon. 
She  relates  that  when  Talleyrand  presented  Bonaparte 
to  the  Directorate  on  his  return  from  Italy,  he  assured 
them  that  General  Bonaparte  "  detested  luxury  and  dis- 
play, wretched  ambitions  of  ordinary  spirits,  and  that 
he  loved  the  poetry  of  Ossian,  especially  because  it  de- 
taches one  from  the  earth."  She  adds  that  the  earth 
would  not  have  asked  anything  better  than  to  have  him 
detach  himself  from  it. 1 

But  let  us  come  to  the  more  mature  expression  of 
Madame  de  StaeTs  views.  Her  "  Germany "  bears  the 
marks  not  only  of  her  travels  in  Italy,  Austria,  and 
Germany  during  the  ten  years  that  had  elapsed  since  the 
publication  of  the  "  Literature  "  but  also  of  important 
personal  influences.  We  are  told  that  the  proper  rule  to 
follow  in  accounting  for  the  ideas  of  a  woman  is,  Cher- 
chez  I'homme  ;  and  we  cannot  entirely  neglect  this  rule 
even  in  the  case  of  Madame  de  Stael,  the  most  intellec- 
tual of  modern  women.  Heine  complained  that  through- 
out the  "  Germany "  he  could  hear  with  disagree- 
able distinctness  the  falsetto  voice  of  August  Wilhelm 
Schlegel.  It  is  not  surprising  that  with  such  a  guide  she 
not  only  gave  undue  attention  to  certain  German  ro- 
mantic writers,  but  inclined  to  romanticize  Germany  in 
general.  She  was  especially  indignant  at  a  phrase  of  the 
letter  in  which  Savary,  Duke  of  Rovigo,  announced  to 
her  the  confiscation  of  the  "  Germany  "  and  her  ban- 
ishment :  "  Your  last  work  is  not  French."  Yet  in  a 
sense  Savary  was  right.  The  Germany  that  she  paints 

1  Considerations  sur  la  Revolution  franfaise,  c.  xxvi. 


MADAME  DE   STAEL  13 

becomes  (somewhat  like  the  Gennania  of  Tacitus)  a 
sort  of  Arcadia,  against  which  the  French  corruption 
"sticks  more  fiery  off."  The  book  brought  up  before 
Heine  the  image  of  a  "  passionate  woman  eddying  about 
like  a  whirlwind  through  our  tranquil  Germany,  exclaim- 
ing everywhere  delightedly,  '  0  how  sweet  is  the  peace 
that  I  breathe  here ! '  She  had  got  overheated  in  France 
and  came  among  us  to  cool  off.  The  chaste  breath  of 
our  poets  was  so  comforting  to  her  boiling  and  fiery 
heart.  She  looked  upon  our  philosophers  as  so  many 
different  kinds  of  ices ;  she  sipped  Kant  like  a  vanilla 
sherbet  and  Fichte  like  a  pistachio  cream.  '  0  what  a 
charming  coolness  reigns  in  your  woods ! '  she  kept  con- 
stantly exclaiming ;  '  what  a  ravishing  odor  of  violets ! 
How  peacefully  the  canary-birds  twitter  in  their  little 
German  nests  !  You  are  good  and  virtuous ;  you  have  n't 
as  yet  any  idea  of  the  moral  depravity  that  prevails 
among  us  in  France  in  the  rue  du  Bac ! ' ' 

This  legend  of  an  idyllic  Germany,  a  land  of  senti- 
mental dreamers  and  philosophers  who  refused  to  in- 
terest themselves  in  anything  less  than  the  universe,1 
survived  in  France  to  some  extent  until  the  rude  awak- 
ening of  1870.  To  this  nation  of  noble  enthusiasts  Ma- 
dame de  Stael  opposes  the  drily  analytical  French.  It  is 
at  bottom  the  same  contrast  that  Coleridge  and  Carlyle 
elaborated  in  England.  The  German  is  not,  like  the 
Frenchman,  imprisoned  in  the  uninspired  understanding 
( Ver  stand),  but  dwells  in  the  region  of  the  imaginative 
and  synthetic  reason  ( Vernunft}.  The  psychological  ele- 
1  De  VAUemagne,  le  Partie,  c.  xvin. 


14  MODEKN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ments  of  the  opposition  thus  worked  up  into  a  fine 
metaphysical  distinction,  are  already  manifest  in  the 
quarrel  between  Rousseau  the  enthusiast,  and  Voltaire 
the  mocking  analyst.  We  are  simply  witnessing  the  in- 
ternational triumph  of  Rousseau  over  Voltaire.  The  clos- 
ing pages  of  the  "  Germany"  in  which  she  exalts  enthu- 
siasm as  the  distinctive  German  virtue  and  at  the  same 
time  warns  the  French  against  the  spirit  of  cold  reason- 
ing and  calculation  are,  as  she  herself  says,  the  sum- 
ming up  of  her  whole  work.1  They  are  also,  we  are  told, 
the  pages  that  give  the  best  idea  of  her  actual  conversa- 
tion.2 

Madame  de  Stael  is  really  arguing  against  a  social 
order  the  ultimate  refinements  of  which  were  necessary, 
as  we  have  seen,  for  her  own  happiness.  In  her  whole  at- 
tack on  French  society,  its  artificiality  and  conventional- 
ism and  its  abuse  of  ridicule,  in  her  charge  that  the  spirit 
of  imitation  had  killed  spontaneity  and  enthusiasm,  she 
simply  repeats,  often  less  tellingly,  the  arguments  of 
Rousseau.  "It  is  unbelievable,"  says  Rousseau  of  the 
French,  "  to  what  a  degree  everything  is  stiff,  precise 
and  calculated  in  what  they  call  the  rules  of  etiquette. 
.  .  .  Even  if  this  people  of  imitators  were  full  of  origi- 
nals it  would  be  impossible  to  discover  the  fact,  for  no 
man  dares  to  be  himself.  You  must  do  as  other  people 
do  ;  that  is  the  first  maxim  in  the  wisdom  of  the  coun- 
try. .  .  .  You  might  suppose  they  were  so  many  marion- 
ettes nailed  to  the  same  board  or  pulled  by  the  same 

1  De  I'Allemagne,  4e  Partie,  c.  xi. 

1  Sainte-Beuve  :  Chateaubriand,  n,  188. 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  15 

wire." 1  "  An  aristocratic  power,"  Madame  de  Stael  com- 
plained in  turn, "  good  form  and  elegance,  had  triumphed 
over  energy,  depth,  feeling,  wit  itself." 2  It  had  pronounced 
"  an  ostracism  against  everything  strong  and  individual. 
These  proprieties,  slight  in  appearance  and  despotic  at 
bottom,  dispose  of  the  whole  of  life ;  they  have  by  de- 
grees undermined  love,  enthusiam,  religion,  everything 
save  egotism,  that  irony  cannot  touch  because  it  ex- 
poses itself  to  censure  and  not  to  ridicule."3  A  certain 
conception  of  decorum,  a  "certain  factitious  grandeur 
not  made  for  the  human  heart,"  as  Rousseau  had  put  it, 
always  stood  in  the  way  of  naturalness.  "  In  the  pictures 
and  bas-reliefs  in  which  Louis  XIV  is  painted,"  says 
Madame  de  Stael,  "  at  one  time  as  Jupiter,  at  another 
as  Hercules,  he  is  represented  as  naked  or  clothed  sim- 
ply in  a  lion  skin,  but  always  with  his  big  wig  on  his 
head."4 

This  idea  of  decorum,  as  Rousseau  had  already  pointed 
out,  had  been  especially  fatal  to  naturalness  in  the  drama 
(la  scene  moderne  ne  quitte  plus  son  ennuyeuse  dig- 
nite).  "We  rarely  escape,"  says  Madame  de  Stael  in 
turn,  "  from  a  certain  conventional  nature  which  gives 
the  same  coloring  to  ancient  as  to  modern  manners,  to 
crime  as  to  virtue,  to  murder  as  to  gallantry."5  The 
pathway  of  escape  from  this  pale  conventionality  is  a 
more  thorough  study  of  history.  "  The  natural  tendency 
of  the  age  is  towards  historical  tragedy."  If  she  had  said 

1  Nouvelle  Heloise,  2e  Partie,  lettre  xvn. 

a  De  I'Attemagne,  le  Partie,  c.  xi.  •  Ibid.,  le  Partie,  c.  ix. 

*  Ibid.,  2?  Partie,  c.  xxxi.  •  Ibid.,  2«  Partie,  c.  xv. 


16  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

towards  historical  melodrama,  she  would  very  nearly  have 
proved  herself  a  prophetess. 

The  weapon  with  which  society  punishes  those  who 
depart  from  its  notions  of  decorum  and  good  taste  is 
ridicule.  "  In  France,"  says  Madame  de  Stael,  "  the 
memory  of  social  proprieties  pursues  talent  even  into  its 
most  intimate  emotions,  and  the  fear  of  ridicule  is  the 
sword  of  Damocles  that  no  festival  of  the  imagination 
can  make  it  forget."  *  The  whole  error  arises  from  con- 
founding taste  in  the  literary  with  taste  in  the  society 
sense.  Madame  de  Stael  therefore  makes  her  main  at- 
tack on  "  good  taste,"  and  its  tendency  to  be  merely 
negative  and  restrictive.  Taste  in  the  literary  sense 
should  get  beyond  petty  fault-finding,  based  on  rules 
and  formal  requirements,  and  become  generous  and 
comprehensive  and  appreciative.  Taste  in  poetry  derives 
from  nature  and  like  it  should  be  creative.2  The  prin- 
ciples of  this  taste  are  therefore  entirely  different  from 
those  that  depend  on  social  relations.  She  relates  how 
she  attended  at  Vienna  the  public  course  of  A.  W. 
Schlegel  and  was  "  dumbfounded  at  hearing  a  critic  elo- 
quent as  an  orator,  who  far  from  attacking  faults  —  the 
eternal  food  of  jealous  mediocrity  —  merely  sought  to 
revive  creative  genius."  "  Next  to  genius  what  is  most 
like  it  is  the  power  to  know  it  and  admire  it."3 

This  is  the  message  that  the  chief  romantic  critics  of 
France,  England  and  Germany  managed  to  get  uttered 
in  some  form  or  other  at  the  beginning  of  the  nine- 

1  De  I'Allemagne,  2e  Partie,  c.  ix.  2  Ibid.,  2e  Partie,  c.  xiv. 

*  Ibid.,  2«  Partie,  c.  xxxi. 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  17 

teenth  century.  "The  rules,"  says  Madame  de  Stael, 
"  are  only  barriers  to  keep  children  from  falling."  These 
barriers  are  to  be  set  aside  and  no  new  restrictive  prin- 
ciple is  to  be  imposed  on  either  critic  or  creator,  whose 
roles  indeed  are  very  much  confounded.  Genius  is  to  be 
purely  effusive  and  the  critic,  instead  of  serving  as  a 
check  on  genius,  is  only  to  enter  sympathetically  and 
comprehensively  into  its  effusions. 

One  might  suppose  that  such  an  expansive  view  both 
of  taste  and  of  genius  would  not  stop  short  of  pure  im- 
pressionism. Since  there  is  no  norm  that  can  set  bounds 
to  the  creative  writer  in  the  unfolding  of  his  originality 
or  to  the  comprehension  and  sympathy  with  which  the 
critic  enters  into  this  originality,  taste  would  seem  bound 
to  become  entirely  fluid.  Germany  is  as  a  matter  of  fact 
praised  as  the  land  where  there  is  no  taste  in  the  French 
sense,  and  where  every  man  is  free  to  follow  his  own 
impressions. l  Criticism,  if  it  does  not  judge,  may  at 
least  reveal  the  individual,  and  in  this  respect  Madame 
de  Stael  anticipates  Sainte-Beuve.  "  Each  character,"  she 
says,  "is  almost  a  new  world  for  any  one  who  knows 
how  to  observe  with  finesse,  and  I  am  not  acquainted  in 
the  science  of  the  human  heart  with  any  general  idea 
completely  applicable  to  particular  cases." 2  Sainte- 
Beuve  for  his  part  had  such  a  predilection  for  Madame 
de  Stael  that  she  has  been  called  the  heroine  of  the 
"Lundis." 

1    De  VAllemagne,  2e  Partie,  c.  I.  *  Ibid.,  4e  Partie,  c.  VI. 


18  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ill 

Though  Madame  de  Stael  is  interested  in  differ- 
ences rather  than  identities,  the  differences  that  interest 
her  most  after  all  are  not  so  much  those  between  indi- 
viduals as  those  between  nationalities.  To  the  claims  of 
the  French  and  the  classicist  to  possess  a  monopoly  of 
good  taste,  what  she  really  opposes  are  the  claims  of  na- 
tional taste.  "  It  is  national  taste  alone,"  she  says,  "that 
can  decide  about  the  drama.  We  must  recognize  that  if 
foreigners  conceive  of  the  art  of  the  theatre  differently 
from  us,  it  is  not  through  ignorance  or  barbarism  but  in 
accordance  with  deep  reflections  that  are  worthy  of 
consideration."  *  Few  persons  have  been  more  preoccu- 
pied than  she  with  questions  of  national  psychology. 
In  Corinne,  for  example,  we  have  not  merely  the  con- 
flict and  interplay  of  different  characters,  but  of  differ- 
ent civilizations;  and  as  usual  the  French  do  not  show 
to  advantage  in  contrast  with  other  nationalities.  Na- 
poleon himself  is  said  to  have  written  the  article  in  the 
"  Moniteur  "  in  which  Madame  de  Stael  is  attacked  for 
having  made  of  the  amiable  but  hopelessly  superficial 
Comte  d'Erfeuil  the  typical  Frenchman. 

Her  conception  of  the  relation  of  nationalities  to  one 
another  simply  reproduces  on  a  larger  scale  the  Rous- 
seauistic  conception  of  the  proper  relation  of  individ- 
uals. Each  nationality  is  to  be  spontaneous  and  original 
and  self-assertive,  and  at  the  same  time  infinitely  open 
and  hospitable  to  other  national  originalities.  Nation- 
alism in  short  is  to  be  tempered  by  cosmopolitanism,  and 

1  De  I'Allemagne,  2«  Partie,  c.  xv. 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  19 

both  are  to  be  but  diverse  aspects  of  Rousseauistic  en- 
thusiasm. The  first  law  for  nationalities  as  for  individ- 
uals is  not  to  imitate  but  to  be  themselves.  Thus  Ma- 
dame de  Stae'l  is  indifferent  to  the  work  of  Wieland 
because  it  seems  to  her  less  a  native  German  product 
than  a  reflection  of  French  taste  (V  originalite  nation- 
ale  vaut  mieux.) x  Having,  however,  made  sure  of  its 
own  originality  each  nation  is  then  to  complete  itself  by 
foreign  borrowings.  For  example,  "  in  order  that  the 
superior  men  of  France  and  Germany  may  attain  to  the 
highest  degree  of  perfection,  the  Frenchman  must  be 
religious  and  the  German  somewhat  worldly.  Piety  is 
opposed  to  the  dissipation  of  spirit  which  is  the  fault 
and  grace  of  the  French  nation  ;  the  knowledge  of  men 
and  society  would  give  the  Germans  in  literature  the 
taste  and  dexterity  they  lack." 2  "  The  nations  should 
serve  as  guides  to  one  another.  .  .  .  There  is  something 
very  strange  in  the  difference  between  one  people  and 
another :  the  climate,  the  aspect  of  nature,  language, 
government,  finally  and  above  all  the  events  of  history, — 
a  power  even  more  extraordinary  than  all  others,  —  con- 
tribute to  these  diversities,  and  no  man,  however  supe- 
rior he  may  be,  can  guess  what  is  developed  naturally  in 
the  mind  of  the  man  who  lives  on  another  soil  and  breathes 
another  air.  It  is  well  then  in  every  country  to  welcome 
foreign  thoughts,  for  this  kind  of  hospitality  brings  for- 
tune to  him  who  exercises  it."3 

Madame  de  Stael  thus  appears  as  the  ideal  cosmopol- 

1  De  rAttemagne,  2e  Partie,  c.  rv.  2  Ibid.,  2?  Partie,  c.  I. 

8  Ibid.,  2e  Partie, 


20  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

itan,  as  the  person  who  has  perhaps  done  more  than 
anyone  else  to  help  forward  the  comparative  study  of 
literature  as  we  now  understand  it.  But  is  there  not 
something  Utopian  in  the  whole  conception,  is  there  any 
adequate  counterpoise  to  the  inordinate  emphasis  that 
is  placed  on  the  centrifugal  elements  of  originality  and 
self-expression  ?  When  individual  or  national  differences 
are  pushed  beyond  a  certain  point  what  comes  into  play 
is  not  sympathy  but  antipathy.  Madame  de  Stael  admits 
that  her  cosmopolitanism  is  only  for  the  few.  The  ordi- 
nary Frenchman  and  German,  for  instance,  remind  her  in 
their  relationship  to  one  another  of  the  fable  of  La 
Fontaine  in  which  the  stork  cannot  eat  off  the  plate  or 
the  fox  out  of  the  long-necked  bottle.  It  is  not  sure 
that  even  the  few  will  have  sufficient  comprehension  and 
sympathy  to  overleap  the  invisible  barriers  that  are  set 
up  by  individual  and  national  idiosyncrasy.  We  hear  of 
the  tact  needed  by  Madame  de  Stael  to  keep  in  check  the 
antipathies  that  were  quivering  just  beneath  the  sur- 
face in  the  international  elite  she  had  gathered  together 
at  Coppet.  Between  Schlegel  and  Sismondi,  for  example, 
there  existed  what  Sainte-Beuve  calls  une  haine  de  race. 
A  still  better  test  of  the  theory  is  the  meeting  of 
Madame  de  Stael  with  Goethe  and  Schiller  at  Weimar, 
perhaps  the  best  instance  on  record  of  ideal  cosmopolitan 
contact.  Crabb  Robinson,  who  was  at  Weimar  at  this 
time,  insinuated  to  Madame  de  Stael  that  she  did  not 
understand  Goethe's  poetry;  whereupon  her  black  eyes 
flashed  and  she  replied,  "I  understand  everything  that 
deserves  to  be  understood."  As  for  Goethe  and  Schiller, 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  21 

the  letters  they  exchanged  with  one  another  during  her 
visit  do  not  make  altogether  agreeable  reading.  Schiller 
denied  her  any  sense  for  what  Germans  call  poetry,  de- 
clared it  a  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost  to  speak  even 
one  word  according  to  her  dialect,  was  overwhelmed 
by  her  volubility,  and  felt  when  she  finally  left  as  though 
he  were  just  recovering  from  a  severe  illness.  Goethe 
complains  that  she  had  no  idea  of  duty  and  wished  to 
settle  in  a  five  minutes'  conversation  the  kind  of  ques- 
tions that  should  only  be  debated  in  the  depths  of  a 
man's  conscience  between  himself  and  God.  Both  are 
agreed  that  she  took  her  departure  none  too  soon.  Later, 
enlightened  by  the  publication  of  the  "  Germany," 
Goethe  dilates  on  the  importance  of  a  meeting  that 
seemed  at  the  time,  he  admits,  a  mere  surface  play  of 
personal  and  national  antipathies :  "  That  work  on  Ger- 
many which  owed  its  origin  to  such  social  conversations 
must  be  looked  on  as  a  mighty  implement,  whereby  in 
the  Chinese  wall  of  antiquated  prejudices  that  separated 
us  from  France,  a  broad  gap  was  broken ;  so  that  across 
the  Rhine  and  in  consequence  of  this  across  the  Channel, 
our  neighbors  at  last  took  closer  knowledge  of  us ;  and 
now  the  whole  remote  West  is  open  to  our  influences." 1 

IV 

Possibly  the  most  important  chapter  in  the  "Ger- 
many " 2  is  that  in  which  Madame  de  Stael  takes  up  again 

1  Annals,  1804.  Carlyle  has  collected  the  passages  from  Goethe  and 
Schiller  that  bear  on  Madame  de  Stael's  visit  to  Weimar  in  an  appendix 
to  the  second  volume  of  his  critical  essays. 

a  2«  Partie,  c.  xi. 


22  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

her  distinction  between  the  literature  of  the  South  and 
that  of  the  North  and  definitely  describes  the  two  tra- 
ditions as  classic  and  romantic,  thus  giving  international 
currency  to  the  application  that  the  Schlegels  had  made 
of  these  epithets  to  two  distinct  literary  schools.  Classic 
had  always  passed  as  the  norm  of  perfection.  But  Ma- 
dame de  Stael  refuses  to  discuss  the  relative  superiority 
of  classic  and  romantic  taste.  "  It  is  enough  to  show," 
she  says,  turning  determinist  for  the  moment,  "  that 
this  diversity  of  tastes  derives  not  only  from  accidental 
causes,  but  also  from  the  primitive  sources  of  imagina- 
tion and  thought."  *  She  here  appears  as  a  disciple  of 
Herder  and  the  other  German  primitivists  who  had  them- 
selves merely  elaborated  the  primitivism  of  Rousseau 
on  a  national  scale.  In  true  Rousseauistic  fashion  we 
are  to  advance  by  looking  backward,  we  are  to  progress 
by  reverting  to  origins;  only  in  this  way  can  we  escape 
from  the  artificial  and  the  imitative  and  recover  the 
spontaneous  and  the  original.  Our  choice  is  not  between 
classic  poetry  and  romantic  poetry,  "but  between  the 
imitation  of  the  one  and  the  inspiration  of  the  other." 
"The  literature  of  the  ancients  is  among  the  moderns 
a  transplanted  literature,  romantic  or  chivalrous  litera- 
ture is  indigenous  among  us  and  has  been  produced  by 
our  religion  and  our  institutions."  Writers  who  imitate 
the  ancients  have  to  conform  to  strict  rules  because  they 
cannot  consult  their  own  nature  and  memories,  all  the 
religious  and  political  circumstances  that  gave  rise  to 
the  ancient  masterpieces  having  changed.  "  Poems  im- 
1  De  rAllemagnc,  2«  Partie,  c.  xi. 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  23 

itative  of  the  antique  are  rarely  popular  because  they 
are  not  related  at  present  to  anything  national."  Since 
popularity  is  to  be  the  test  of  poetry,  we  are  to  look  in 
estimating  its  worth,  not  merely  backward  but  down- 
ward. "French  poetry  being  the  most  classic  of  all 
modern  poetries  is  the  only  one  which  is  not  diffused 
among  the  people,  whereas  the  stanzas  of  Tasso  are 
sung  by  the  gondoliers  of  Venice,  and  the  Spanish  and 
Portuguese  of  all  classes  know  by  heart  the  verses  of 
Calderon  and  Camoens,"  etc. 

The  truth  in  passages  of  this  kind  is  of  course  mixed 
up  with  the  usual  sophistries  of  the  primitivist.  The 
chief  Rousseauist  venom  of  the  whole  point  of  view  is 
found  in  the  elimination  of  the  aristocratic  and  selective 
element  from  the  standard  of  taste,  and  in  the  assumption 
that  the  proper  judges  of  poetry  are  the  illiterate.  Emer- 
son says  that  we  descend  to  meet.  This  is  no  doubt  true 
of  certain  kinds  of  meeting,  of  the  kind  that  takes  place  at 
an  afternoon  tea,  let  us  say ;  and  Emerson  probably  did  not 
mean  much  more  than  this.  But  the  phrase  may  evidently 
have  another  and,  from  the  humanistic  point  of  view,  far 
more  sinister  meaning.  Instead  of  disciplining  himself 
to  some  form  of  perfection  set  above  his  ordinary  self, 
a  man  sinks  down  from  the  intellectual  to  the  instinctive 
level,  on  the  ground  that  he  is  thus  widening  his  human 
sympathies.  Thus  Tolstoy,  whose  book  on  art  is  indeed 
thereductio  ad  absurdum  of  Rousseauism,  rejects  Sopho- 
cles and  Shakespeare  because  of  their  failure  to  make  an 
immediate  emotional  appeal  to  the  Russian  peasant. 

Moreover  Madame  de  Stael,  to  judge  from  her  choice 


24  MODEKN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

of  examples,  seems  to  be  in  some  confusion  as  to  the  na- 
ture of  popular  poetry.  It  is  not  clear  that  Tasso  is  more 
"popular"  than  Boileau,  whom  Madame  de  Stael attacks 
as  the  extreme  type  of  classic  artificiality.  Boileau  him- 
self says  that  many  of  his  lines  became  proverbs  at  their 
birth.  They  still  remain  proverbs,  whereas  the  verses  of 
Tasso  are  no  longer  sung  by  the  gondoliers  of  Venice. 
In  general  to  look  for  poetry  at  all  among  gondoliers  and 
the  like  is,  under  existing  conditions,  at  least,  to  chase  an 
Arcadian  dream.  For  at  the  very  time  that  one  side  of 
our  civilization  is  sentimentalizing  about  the  primitive, 
another  side  of  this  same  civilization  is  just  as  surely  kill- 
ing it.  At  the  present  rate  the  poetry  of  the  people,  poetry 
that  is  spontaneous  in  the  Rousseauistic  sense,  will  soon 
have  given  way  all  over  the  world  to  the  yellow  journal  or 
the  equivalent. 

The  special  type  of  medievalism  worked  out  by  the 
German  romanticists  and  diffused  by  Madame  de  Stael, 
that  is  the  medievalism  that  would  have  the  European 
nations  break  with  the  classical  tradition  and  return  each 
to  its  own  infancy,  had  its  own  value  as  a  revolt  against 
formalism.  But  it  tended  to  get  rid  of  form  along  with 
formalism.  Recent  research  has  shown  more  and  more 
clearly  that,  wherever  in  the  East  or  West,  we  find  what 
the  French  call  le  grand  art,  art  that  rises  above  the 
merely  decorative  and  renders  the  more  essential  aspects 
of  human  nature  itself,  we  are  dealing  with  some  survival 
of  the  great  Greek  tradition  of  form.  The  man  who  turns 
away  from  the  masterpieces  of  this  tradition  to  study 
the  "Nibelungenlied,"  or  the  "Chanson  de  Roland,"  or 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  25 

the  Irish  Sagas  is  running  the  risk,  even  when  he  is  not 
blinded  by  national  enthusiasm,  of  impairing  his  sense 
of  form. 

Moreover  medievalism  is  not  only  likely  to  involve  a 
loss  of  form,  but  a  loss  of  ideas.  No  amount  of  talk  about 
the  men  of  the  Middle  Ages  being  of  our  own  blood  and 
religion  will  alter  the  essential  fact  that  the  main  move- 
ment of  the  modern  mind  has  been  away  from  the  me- 
diaeval point  of  view.  If  we  are  seeking,  not  for  some 
tower  of  ivory  into  which  we  may  retire  from  the  present, 
but  for  men  who  had  problems  similar  to  our  own,  we 
shall  find  these  men  in  certain  periods  of  classical  anti- 
quity. The  Frenchman  of  to-day  is  nearer  to  Horace  in 
his  outlook  on  life  than  to  the  author  of  the  "  Chanson 
de  Roland."  An  instructor  in  government  recently  said 
to  me  that  the  most  modern  book  on  his  subject  was 
Aristotle's  "Politics."  This  may  prove  that  we  are  be- 
coming pagans  again,  but  we  are  not  going  to  alter  the 
fact  by  romantic  dreaming. 

To  be  sure,  the  mediaeval  primitivists,  though  they 
have  rarely  shone  as  men  of  ideas,  have  been  in  many 
cases  not  merely  romantic  dreamers,  but  also  precise  in- 
vestigators, and  in  this  way  they  have  related  themselves 
to  one  side  of  the  modern  spirit.  I  once  asked  a  young 
American  mediaevalist  what  his  chosen  period  actually 
meant  for  him.  A  rapt  expression  came  into  his  eyes 
and  he  replied  that  for  him  the  Middle  Ages  were  all  a 
beautiful  dream.  To  judge,  however,  by  what  he  actually 
published  one  would  suppose  rather  that  they  were  an 
unusually  dry  philological  fact.  And  this  is  unfair  to 


26  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

the  Middle  Ages.  For  if  the  romantic  medisevalist  by  his 
delvings  into  the  popular  and  the  primitive  has  cut  him- 
self off  in  large  measure  from  modern  thought,  he  has 
also  cut  himself  off,  in  at  least  an  equal  degree,  from  the 
thought  of  the  Middle  Ages.  The  works  (mainly  in  Latin) 
in  which  this  thought  is  to  be  found  are  not  in  the  least 
popular  or  primitive  or  national,  in  Madame  de  StaeTs 
sense, 1  but  derive  along  manifold  lines  from  Greece  and 
Rome  and  Judaea. 

This  literature  that  expressed  the  mind  of  the  Middle 
Ages  was  in  the  highest  degree  cosmopolitan,  but  cos- 
mopolitan in  the  older  and  what  may  turn  out  to  be  the 
only  genuine  sense,  —  that  is,  it  rested  primarily  on  a 
common  discipline  and  not  on  a  common  sympathy. 
Renan,  who  in  his  conception  of  the  ideal  relations  be- 
tween France  and  Germany,  is  perhaps  the  most  distin- 
guished of  Madame  de  Stael's  French  followers,  dreams 
of  an  international  fraternity  of  savants,  "  an  empyrean 
of  pure  ideas,  a  heaven  in  which  there  is  neither  Greek 
nor  barbarian,  neither  German  nor  Latin."  Saint  Paul  in 
the  passage  that  Renan  is  here  paraphrasing  says  that 
these  and  like  distinctions  disappear  for  those  who  have 
become  "  one  in  Christ."  Now  Christ,  for  Saint  Paul,  is 
evidently  the  living  intuition  of  a  law  that  is  set  above 
the  ordinary  self ;  by  taking  on  the  yoke  of  this  law  men 
are  drawn  together  as  to  a  common  centre.  Renan's  no- 
tion that  simply  by  collaborating  in  the  expansion  of 
scientific  knowledge  men  can  achieve  the  union  that, 

1   In  this  sense  Renan  says  that  "  le  sentiment  des  nationality  n'a  pas 
cent  ans."  (Reforme  intellectueUe,  194.) 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  27 

according  to  Saint  Paul,  is  only  to  be  achieved  by  spir- 
itual concentration,  may  turn  out  to  be  Utopian ;  and  it 
is  the  fate  of  the  utopist  to  suffer  sudden  and  severe 
disillusions.  Renan  had  his  disillusion  in  1870.  He  ex- 
pected the  new  Christ  to  come  from  Germany,  as  some 
one  has  put  it,  and  instead  he  got  Bismarck.  He  was 
pained  to  see  how  fiercely  German  national  sentiment 
blazed  up  in  scholars  whom  he  had  regarded  as  being 
before  all  scientific  internationalists,  and  how  mercilessly 
they  gloated  over  the  downfall  of  France.  On  the  other 
hand,  many  a  Frenchman  who  had  been  indulging  like 
Sully  Prudhomme  in  humanitarian  effusions,  suddenly 
awoke  in  1870  as  from  a  dream  and  found  that  his  love 
of  mankind  was  as  naught  compared  with  his  love  of 
his  own  land. 1  "  Let  us  suppress  these  unhealthy  out- 
bursts of  national  self-love,"  cries  Renan.  But  in  the 
name  of  what  principle?  In  a  crisis,  the  altruistic  im- 
pulse either  towards  other  individuals  or  towards  other 
nations  is  likely  to  seem  to  most  men  pale  and  unsub- 
stantial compared  with  the  putting  forth  of  personal  or 
national  power. 

The  modern  cosmopolitan  is  to  be  blamed  not  for  de- 

1  " '  Mon  compatriote,  c'est  1'homme  ! 
Naguere  ainsi  je  dispersals 
Sur  1'univers  ce  cceur  f  rangais : 
J'en  suis  maintenant  e*conome. 


Ces  tendresses,  je  les  ramene 
Etroitement  sur  mon  pays, 
Snr  les  homines  que  j'ai  trahis 
Par  1'amour  de  1'espece  humaine,"  etc. 

(Repentir.) 


28  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

veloping  on  a  magnificent  scale  the  virtues  of  expansion 
but  for  setting  up  these  virtues  as  a  substitute  for  the 
virtues  of  concentration.  He  would  have  us  believe  that 
every  man  can  fly  off  on  his  own  tangent,  and  then  in 
some  mysterious  manner,  known  only  to  romantic  psy- 
chology, become  every  other  man's  brother ;  and  that  the 
same  process  can  be  repeated  on  the  national  scale. 
There  may  after  all  be  something  in  the  traditional  idea 
that  in  order  to  come  together  men  need  to  take  on  the 
yoke  of  a  common  discipline.  But  the  procedure  of  the 
Rousseauist  is  always  to  get  rid  of  law  or  discipline  on 
the  ground  that  it  is  artificial  or  conventional,  and  to  set 
up  in  its  stead  some  enthusiasm  or  sympathy.  Madame 
de  Stael  and  the  romanticists  were  strong  in  their  at- 
tacks on  formalism,  but  in  discarding  the  idea  of  law  it- 
self along  with  the  conventionalities  in  which  it  had  got 
embedded  they  were  almost  incredibly  weak.  They  are 
at  least  equally  weak  in  the  various  sentimental  sophis- 
tries and  pseudo-mystical  devices  to  which  they  resorted 
to  prove  to  themselves  and  others  that  it  is  possible  to 
have  one's  cake  and  eat  it  too,  in  other  words,  to  have 
the  virtues  of  centrality  while  in  the  very  process  of  fly- 
ing off  from  the  centre. 

As  I  have  already  said,  there  is  something  of  this  ro- 
mantic sophistry  in  Madame  de  Stael's  idea  that  a  true 
cosmopolitanism  may  rest  solely  on  the  rounding  out  of 
national  originality  with  international  comprehension 
and  sympathy.  To  stop  at  this  stage  is  simply  to  dodge 
the  more  difficult  half  of  the  problem.  It  is  excellent  to 
be  internationally  comprehensive  and  sympathetic,  but 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  29 

only  as  a  preparation  for  being  internationally  selective. 
Few  moments  are  more  perilous  for  a  country  than  the 
moment  when  it  escapes  from  its  narrow  traditional  dis- 
cipline and  becomes  cosmopolitan.  Unless  some  new 
discipline  intervenes  to  temper  the  expansion,  cosmopol- 
itanism may  be  only  another  name  for  moral  disintegra- 
tion. Nations  no  less  than  individuals,  as  history  tells 
us  only  too  plainly,  may  descend  to  meet.  Their  contact 
with  one  another  may  result  not  in  that  ideal  exchange 
of  virtues  of  which  Madame  de  Stael  dreamed,  but  in  an 
exchange  of  vices.  A  French  traveller  relates  that  on 
penetrating  to  a  remote  hill  town  in  India  he  found  on 
the  mantel-piece  of  the  only  room  for  the  use  of  Eu- 
ropeans in  the  local  club  "  a  collection  of  Fren'ch  books 
for  exportation,  all  that  frightful  literature  by  which 
foreigners  judge  us."  On  somewhat  the  same  principle 
th«  programme  of  the  Moulin  Rouge  was  recently  posted 
about  the  streets  of  Paris  in  five  languages.  One  touch 
of  lubricity,  as  some  one  has  put  it,  makes  the  whole 
world  kin.  A  man  may  become  cosmopolitan  like  young 
Grandet  in  Balzac,  who  travelled  so  much  and  saw  so 
many  standards  of  morality  in  different  countries  that 
he  finally  lost  all  standards  himself  and  became  a  pro- 
fligate. Madame  de  Stael  was  herself  well  aware  of  the 
danger  of  an  indefinite  widening  out  of  one's  horizons. 
"To  see  everything  and  understand  everything,"  she 
says, "  is  a  great  cause  of  uncertainty."  *  Uetendue  meme 
des  conceptions  nuit  &  la  decision  du  caractere? 
But  what  is  the  value  of  a  breadth  that  has  been 

1  De  PAUemagne,  le  Partie,  c.  n.  2  Ibid.,  4f  Partie,  c.  x. 


30  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

gained  at  the  expense  of  judgment  and  lacks  sufficient 
counterpoise  in  character?  True  cosmopolitanism,  it 
would  appear,  like  almost  everything  else  that  is  worth 
having,  is  a  mediation  between  extremes.  We  may  have 
universal  contact  as  at  present,  and  an  international  con- 
federacy of  scientists,  and  plenty  of  persons  who,  in 
Rousseau's  phrase,  are  ready  "  to  embrace  the  whole  of 
mankind  in  their  benevolence,"  and  yet  we  may  fall 
short  of  being  true  cosmopolitans  because  there  is  still 
lacking  the  centripetal  force,  the  allegiance  to  a  common 
standard,  that  can  alone  prevail  against  the  powers  of 
individual  and  national  self-assertion.  "  The  pathway 
of  modern  culture,"  says  Grillparzer,  "  leads  from  hu- 
manity, through  nationality,  to  bestiality."  Long  before 
this  final  stage  is  reached  there  may  be  a  sharp  reaction 
from  the  half-truths  of  the  Rousseauist. 


The  unit  of  Madame  de  StaeTs  thinking,  it  should  be 
observed,  is  the  nation  and  not  the  race.  The  nation  as 
she  conceives  it,  though  she  is  not  specially  clear  or  con- 
sistent on  this  point,  is  not  so  much  a  mere  product  of 
environment  as  a  sort  of  spiritual  entity,  a  body  of  men 
united  by  common  memories  and  achievements  and  as- 
piring to  common  ends.  The  idea  of  race  is  evidently 
much  more  naturalistic,  and,  as  treated  by  many  writers, 
has  become  almost  zoological.  No  one  would  of  course 
deny  the  importance  of  the  racial  factor,  but  the  at- 
tempts that  have  been  made  to  formulate  it  accurately 
have  been  curiously  unsatisfactory.  The  endless  theoriz- 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  31 

ing  that  has  gone  on  about  race  during  the  past  century 
may  indeed  be  seen  in  the  retrospect  to  have  been  the 
happy  hunting-ground  of  the  pseudo-scientist.  And  this 
pseudo-science  is  often  used  to  produce  a  sort  of  emo- 
tional intoxication  that  may  take  the  form  either  of 
exultation  at  one's  own  superiority  or  else  of  contempt 
for  the  (supposedly)  inferior  breeds.  It  gives  a  man  a  fine 
expansive  feeling  to  think  that  he  is  endowed  with  cer- 
tain virtues  simply  because  he  has  taken  the  trouble  to 
be  born  a  Celt  or  a  Teuton  or  an  Anglo-Saxon.  What 
an  exhilaration,  for  example,  Fichte's  audience  must  have 
felt  when  he  told  them  that  there  was  no  special  word 
for  "character"  in  German  because  to  be  a  German 
and  to  have  character  were  synonymous.  The  Germans 
were  an  Urvolk,  the  elect  not  of  God  but  of  nature ;  and 
so  character  instead  of  having  to  be  painfully  acquired 
gushed  up  from  the  primordial  depths  of  their  being.1 

Fichte  speaks  as  a  primitivist,  and  there  is  a  clear  con- 
nection between  primitivism  and  modern  determinism. 
Though  Madame  de  Stael  was  also  a  primitivist,  and  al- 
though she  felt  the  force  of  the  deterministic  argument 
as  based  especially,  perhaps,  on  the  influence  of  climate 
and  of  the  historical  "moment," 2  she  nevertheless  shrunk 
from  accepting  it.  She  admits  that  "  no  one  can  change 
the  primitive  data  of  his  birth,  his  country,  his  age,"  etc.3 
Yet  she  is  loath  to  admit  that  "  circumstances  create  us 

1  "  Charakter  baben  und  deutscb  sein  ist  ohne  Zweifel  gleichbedeutend, 
and  die  Sache  bat  in  unsrer  Sprache  keinen  besondern  Narnen,  weil  sie 
eben  ohne  alles  unser  Wissen  und  Besinnung  aus  unserm  Sein  unmittel- 
bar  hervorgehen  soil"  (Reden  an  die  deutsche  Nation,  xn). 

8  Cf.  p.  19.  «  De  I'Allemagne,  4e  Partie,  c.  v. 


32  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

what  we  are."  "  If  outer  objects  are  the  cause  of  every- 
thing that  takes  place  in  our  soul,  what  independent 
thought  would  emancipate  us  from  their  influence  ?  The 
fatality  which  descended  from  heaven  filled  the  soul 
with  a  sacred  terror,  whereas  that  which  binds  us  to  the 
earth  only  degrades  us."  *  This  distinction  between  the 
psychological  effects  of  the  two  types  of  fatality,  that 
of  Calvin,  let  us  say,  and  that  of  Taine,  would  seem  to 
be  confirmed  by  the  naturalistic  novel  and  other  devel- 
opments in  France  and  elsewhere  during  the  second  half 
of  the  nineteenth  century. 

The  influence  of  Madame  de  Stael  at  home  and  abroad 
would  require  a  separate  study.  Wherever  this  influence 
made  itself  felt,  as  in  Italy  for  example,2  it  stimulated 
national  sentiment,  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other, 
undermined  pseudo-classic  formalism,  especially  in  the 
drama.  The  French  romanticists  had  rather  a  slender 
stock  of  ideas,  but  for  such  ideas  as  they  had  they  drew 
largely  on  Madame  de  Stael.  Hugo  does  not  mention 
her  in  the  "  Preface  de  Cromwell,"  but  the  relationship 
between  the  "  Germany  "  and  this  manifesto  of  romanti- 
cism can  be  easily  established. 

Madame  de  StaeTs  influence  in  both  France  and  Italy 
is  associated  with  that  of  another  critic  who  was  in  some 
respects  her  disciple  and  who  acted  upon  her  in  turn  — 

1  De  VAllemagne,  3e  Partie,  c.  I. 

3  This  Italian  influence  is  perhaps,  however,  overstated  by  Texte  when 
he  says  of  her  visit  to  Italy  :  "  Elle  rencontra  alors  Confalonieri,  apotre 
de  1'  inddpendance,  et  dcrivit  dans  la  Biblioteca  italiana  un  article  rctentis- 
sant  qui  suscita  le  monvement  romautique  italien  "  ( Julleville's  Hist,  de 
la  Lit.fr.,  vu,  709-710). 


MADAME  DE  STAEL  33 

Claude  Fauriel,  the  friend  and  admirer  of  Manzoni. 
Perhaps  no  one  did  more  than  Fauriel  for  the  establish- 
ment of  the  new  scholarship  in  France  at  the  beginning 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  Sainte-Beuve  calls  him  the 
"  secret  initiator  of  most  of  the  distinguished  spirits 
of  this  time  in  literary  method  and  criticism." 1  (I  speak 
elsewhere  of  Fauriel's  influence  on  Sainte-Beuve  him- 
self.) Fauriel  covered  a  territory  that  would  nowadays  be 
divided  among  at  least  a  score  of  specialists  —  Sanskrit, 
Provencal,  early  Italian,  Basque,  Celtic  dialects,  etc.  He 
had  a  truly  Rousseauistic  passion  for  the  primitive  (we 
are  told  that  among  plants  he  preferred  the  mosses). 
The  unconscious  felicities  of  instinct  appealed  to  him 
more  than  any  form  of  deliberate  art.  In  this  sense  we 
may  say  with  Sainte-Beuve  that  he  was  the  "  most  anti- 
academic  mind  by  vocation  that  had  ever  appeared  in 
France." 2  He  was  in  fact  a  sort  of  French  Herder,  less 
enthusiastic  and  less  enamored  of  general  ideas,  but 
with  more  scholarly  precision.  Yet  though  he  was,  as 
Sainte-Beuve  estimates,  twenty  years  ahead  of  his  times, 
though  he  began  most  of  the  distinctively  modern  forms 
of  investigation,  he  did  not  at  any  moment  break  abruptly 
with  the  past.  He  marks  the  gradual  transition  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  eighteenth  to  that  of  the  nineteenth 
century.3 

1  Portraits  contemporains,  rv,  127.          2  Ibid.,  232.          8  Ibid.,  178. 


II 

JOUBBBT 

IF  Madame  de  Stael  is  the  best  type  of  the  Rousseau- 
istic  enthusiast  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury we  have  in  Joubert  the  representative  of  a  very 
different  kind  of  enthusiasm,  the  enthusiasm  that  may 
be  associated  with  Plato  rather  than  with  Rousseau. 
The  sharpness  of  the  contrast  between  the  Platonist  and 
the  Rousseauist  may  be  inferred  from  Joubert's  very 
severe  judgment  on  Madame  de  Stael  which  I  have  already 
quoted  (p.  8  ).  He  writes  in  one  of  his  letters  that  he 
had  "  avoided  seeing  her  a  thousand  times  and  looked 
on  her  as  a  fatal  and  pernicious  being." 1  Yet  when  she 
died  and  the  news  of  her  death  had  been  received  with 
general  silence  and  indifference,  in  strange  contrast  to 
the  tumult  in  which  she  had  lived,  one  of  those  most 
sincerely  moved  was  Joubert.  "  The  clouding  over  of 
such  a  reputation,"  he  writes,  "  really  afflicted  me,  and 
when  I  saw  that  no  one  was  willing  to  think  of  this  poor 
•woman,  I  began  to  think  of  her  all  by  myself  and  to 
regret  with  inconsolable  bitterness  the  misuse  she  had 
made  of  so  much  intellect,  energy  and  goodness." 2 

1  Cor.,  237.  My  references  are  to  Paul  de  Raynal's  edition  in  two 
volumes  (4e  e"d.,  1866).  In  the  volume  containing  the  Pensees,  no  numbers 
are  used  in  the  opening  chapter  ("L'auteur  peint  parlui-meme  ").  The 
thoughts  are  arranged  by  subjects  in  the  following  numbered  chapters, 
which  are  therefore  called  "  Titres." 

a  Ibid. 


JOUBERT  35 

So  far  as  the  general  public  was  concerned  Joubert 
himself  lived  in  entire  obscurity,  more  "  enamored,"  in 
his  own  phrase,  "of  perfection  than  of  glory. "  Yet  he 
was  singularly  fortunate  both  in  the  friendships  he  en- 
joyed during  his  lifetime  and  the  kind  of  reputation  he 
has  had  since  his  death.  His  "  Pensees  "  were  presented 
to  French  readers  by  Chateaubriand  and  Sainte-Beuve, 
and  to  English  readers  by  Matthew  Arnold  in  one  of 
the  best  critical  essays  ever  written  in  English.1  The 
literary  "Pensees"  show  such  a  fine  quality  of  criti- 
cal insight  that  Joubert  has  come  to  be  regarded  as  the 
critics'  critic  much  as  Spenser  has  been  called  the  poets' 
poet.  He  has  that  gift  of  ornate  conciseness  which 
he  himself  declared  to  be  the  supreme  beauty  of  style. 
It  is  not,  however,  his  phrase  that  he  polishes,  he  says, 
but  his  idea;  "I  wait  until  the  drop  of  light  that 
I  need  is  formed  and  falls  from  my  pen." 2  His  ambition 
was  so  to  express  the  exquisite  as  to  give  it  general  cur- 
rency. Now  it  is  not  easy  to  imagine  a  continuous  dis- 
course made  up  entirely  of  the  exquisite  and  we  are  not 
surprised  when  Joubert  says  he  is  unfitted  for  continu- 
ous discourse.  "  I  lack  intermediary  ideas." 3  His  say- 
ing that  sages  do  not  compose  reminds  one  of  Emer- 
son's description  of  the  sentences  in  his  own  essays  as 
infinitely  repellent  particles. 

The  danger  for  a  critic  who  aims  solely  at  the  exquis- 
ite or  in  his  own  phrase  at  "  expressing  the  inexpress- 

1  I  am  assuming  a  familiarity  with  this  essay  on  the  part  of  the  reader 
and  have  as  a  rule  avoided  translating  the  same  Pensees. 

2  Pensees,  p.  10. 
8  Ibid.,  p.  8. 


36  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ible  "  *  and  who  lacks  intermediary  ideas,  is  that  he  may 
become  affected  and  obscure,  and  Joubert  does  not  alto- 
gether avoid  these  penalties  of  oversubtlety.  "To 
reach  the  regions  of  light,"  he  says,  "one  must 
pass  through  the  clouds."2  Unfortunately  Joubert 
does  not  always  disengage  himself  from  the  clouds.  But 
personally,  I  should  not  agree  with  those  critics  who 
prefer  his  "Letters"  to  the  "Thoughts"  because  of 
their  greater  simplicity  and  naturalness.  The  "Let- 
ters," however,  do  reveal  one  essential  side  of  Joubert 
far  more  completely  than  the  "  Thoughts."  They  are 
pervaded  by  a  fine  vein  of  whimsical  humor,  an  habit- 
ual sportiveness,  that  suggests  to  Sainte-Beuve  a  com- 
parison with  Charles  Lamb.  It  seemed  to  Joubert  an 
important  part  of  wisdom  to  distinguish  the  very  few 
things  that  are  to  be  taken  seriously  and  then  to  take 
all  other  things  playfully.  En  tout  il  me  faut  quelque 
jeu?  He  is  at  the  opposite  pole  from  those  "serious 
and  gloomy  spirits  who  have  very  futile  doctrines"; 
a  sentence  that  inevitably  calls  to  mind  many  modern 
reformers. 

Possibly  the  danger  of  a  sort  of  transcendental  pre- 
ciosite  in  Joubert  appears  most  clearly  in  some  of  his 
thoughts  on  religion.  He  recognizes  the  existence  of 
matter  only  by  courtesy.  If  the  Creator  withdrew  his 
breath  from  the  world,  he  says,  it  would  "  become  what 
it  was  before  time,  a  grain  of  flattened  metal,  an  atom 
in  the  void,  even  less  than  this;  a  mere  nothing."4  An- 
other sage  of  whom  Joubert  frequently  reminds  one, 

1  Cor.,  20.  2  Tit.  i,  xc.  8  Cor.,  119.  4  Tit.  x,  xra. 


JOTJBERT  37 

does  not  feel  that  he  can  dispose  of  matter  quite  so 
lightly.  "I  can  reason  down  or  deny  everything,"  says 
Emerson,  "  except  this  perpetual  Belly :  feed  he  must 
and  will,  and  I  cannot  make  him  respectable."  One  is 
tempted  to  say  that  in  both  the  literal  and  figurative 
sense,  Joubert  lacked  body.  He  himself  admitted  the 
justness  of  Madame  de  Chatenay's  remark  that  he 
seemed  a  pure  spirit  who  had  stumbled  on  a  body  by 
chance  and  made  the  best  he  could  of  it. 

Though  we  can  detect  in  Joubert  something  of  the 
shrinking  of  the  valetudinarian  from  the  rough  and 
tumble  of  life,  we  cannot  insist  too  strongly  that  his 
spirituality  is  true  spirituality  and  not  the  Rousseauistic 
imitation.  The  words  that  he  traced  almost  with  his 
dying  hand  really  sum  up  the  effort  of  his  whole  life : 
"  22  March,  1824.  The  true,  the  beautiful,  the  just,  the 
holy!  "  He  is  far  removed  from  a  man  like  Coleridge 
who  retired  from  his  actual  obligations  into  a  cloud 
of  opium  and  German  metaphysics.  The  contrast  be- 
tween Coleridge's  speculations  and  his  daily  practice 
recalls  Joubert's  thought,  "  Religion  is  neither  a  theo- 
logy nor  a  theosophy ;  it  is  more  than  all  that :  a  dis- 
cipline, a  law,  a  yoke,  an  indissoluble  engagement." l 
Though  one  of  the  frailest  of  invalids,  Joubert  never 
failed  to  meet  the  demands  of  life.  He  was  justified  in 
saying  of  himself,  "  Behind  the  strength  of  many  men 
there  is  weakness,  whereas  behind  my  weakness  there  is 
strength ;  the  weakness  is  in  the  instrument." 2  His 
fellow-citizens  in  the  little  town  of  Montignac  where  he 

1  Tit.  i,  LXH.  2  Pensees,  p.  8. 


38  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

was  born  elected  him  justice  of  the  peace  and  long  pre- 
served, we  are  told,  the  memory  of  his  efficiency. 

Sainte-Beuve  does  not  seem  to  me  to  strike  quite  the 
right  note  of  praise  when  he  says  that  "  once  to  have 
known  one  of  these  divine  spirits  (like  Joubert)  who 
seem  the  living  definition  of  the  phrase  of  the  poet : 
divinae  particulam  aurae,  is  to  be  forever  disgusted 
with  all  that  is  not  fine,  delicate,  delectable ;  with  all 
that  is  not  perfume  and  pure  essence ;  it  is  to  prepare 
for  oneself  assuredly  many  annoyances  and  misfor- 
tunes."1 This  passage  suggests  too  strongly  that 
Joubert  was  too  good  for  human  nature's  daily  food, 
whereas  he  was  one  of  the  shrewdest  and  most  practical 
of  men.  He  even  pushed  too  far  his  horror  of  the 
merely  speculative  when  he  said  you  can  learn  more  of 
the  art  of  government  from  a  single  page  of  Machia- 
velli's  "  Prince  "  than  from  the  whole  of  Montesquieu's 
"Spirit  of  Laws."2 

The  danger  of  Joubert's  avowed  dislike  for  mere 
reality,  Vaffreuse  realite,  as  he  calls  it,  is  not  so  much 
a  romantic  retreat  into  the  tower  of  ivory  as  an  undue 
sympathy  for  certain  conceptions  of  the  noble  style  and 
the  grand  manner.  He  says  in  defending  Corneille  that 
we  should  rise  above  the  trivialities  of  earth  even  if  we 
have  to  mount  on  stilts.3  His  attitude  towards  the  oppo- 
site school  of  art  appears  in  his  remark  that  the  novels 

1  Chateaubriand,  n,  138. 

2  As  an  example  of  his  courage  and  good  sense   see   his   letter  to 
Fontanes,  then  Grand  Master  of  the  University,  in  which  he  protests 
against  the  poor  pay  of  teachers  and  professors  (Cor.  217). 

8  Tit.  xxiv,  v,  VH. 


JOUBERT  39 

of  Lesage  "  seem  to  have  been  written  in  a  coffee-house 
by  a  player  of  dominoes  just  after  leaving  the 
theatre." l 

Joubert's  shrinking  from  Vaffreuse  realite  is  also  to 
be  connected  with  the  fact  that  he  had  lived  through 
the  Reign  of  Terror.  "  The  Revolution,"  he  says, 
"  drove  my  spirit  from  the  real  world  by  making  it  too 
horrible  for  me."2  "Revolutions  are  times  when  the 
poor  man  is  not  sure  of  his  probity,  the  rich  man  of  his 
fortune  and  the  innocent  man  of  his  lif e." 3 

Joubert  as  a  young  man  had  come  into  contact  with 
Diderot  and  had  got  the  initiation  into  the  new  critical 
spirit  that  such  a  contact  implies.  But  even  without  the 
Revolution  Joubert  would  never  have  been  a  thorough- 
going modern.  The  ancients,  he  says,  were  appealed  to 
by  the  magic  of  the  past  and  not  like  the  moderns  by 
the  magic  of  the  future,4  and  he  was  in  this  respect  a 
true  ancient.  The  French  are  wont,  rightly  for  the  most 
part,  to  call  their  reactionaries  "haters  of  things  new" 
(misoneistes) ;  but  the  epithet  that  should  be  applied  to 
Joubert  is  the  more  gracious  Greek,  —  "  lover  of  things 
old  "  (<£i\apxcuos).  "  The  great  drawback  of  the  new 
books,"  he  says,  "is  that  they  keep  us  from  reading 
the  old  ones." 5 

What  the  eighteenth  century  wanted,  according  to 
Joubert,  was  not  religious  liberty,  but  irreligious  liberty.6 
It  was  for  discarding  as  mere  prejudice  everything  that 
did  not  make  itself  immediately  intelligible  either  to 

1  Tit.  xxxn.  8  Pensees,  p.  4.  8  Tit.  xvi,  LIX. 

4  Ibid.,  xvn,  i.  6  Tit.  xvni,  Lvn.       •  Ibid.,  xvm,  xm. 


40  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

reason  or  feeling.  "  My  discoveries,  and  every  one  has 
his  own,"  he  says,  "have  brought  me  back  to  preju- 
dices." l  "  Our  reformers  have  said  to  experience :  thou 
art  a  dotard,  and  to  the  past :  thou  art  a  child." 2  The 
other  extreme  towards  which  Joubert  himself  inclines 
is  to  impose  the  past  too  despotically  on  the  present. 
Though  he  vivifies  tradition  with  insight,  more  perhaps 
than  any  other  French  reactionary,  he  is  nevertheless 
too  resolutely  traditional.3  Such  has  been  the  revolu- 
tionary stress  of  the  past  hundred  years  that  it  has  rarely 
failed  to  disturb  the  poise  even  of  the  most  finely  temp- 
ered spirits.  Joubert  tends  to  see  only  the  benefits  of 
order  just  as  Emerson  tends  to  see  only  the  benefits  of 
emancipation. 

In  the  name  of  what  he  conceives  to  be  order,  he 
would  be  too  ready  to  deliver  society  over  to  the  Jesuits 
and  fix  it  in  a  sort  of  hieratic  immobility.  He  sees  our 
main  modern  misfortune  in  what  Emerson  regards  as 
our  main  modern  gain.  "  Unhappy  epochs,"  he  exclaims, 
"  when  every  man  weighs  everything  by  his  own  weight, 
and  walks,  as  the  Bible  says,  by  the  light  of  his  own 
lamp  " ; 4  when  the  broad  communications  that  formerly 
existed  with  heaven  are  broken  and  every  one  has  to  build 
his  private  ladder.5  Indeed  the  more  leading-strings  the 
better,  if  it  be  true, as  he  asserts,  that  "few  are  worthy  of 
experience,  most  allow  themselves  to  be  corrupted  by  it." 6 

1  Pensees,  p.  4.  3  Tit.  xvm,  xx. 

8  "  Aux  Grecs,  et  surtout  aux  Atlidniens,  le  beau  littdraire  et  civil;  aux 
Remains,  le  beau  moral  et  politique;  aux  Juifs,  le  beau  religienx  et  domes- 
tique;  aux  autres  peuples,  1'imitation  de  ces  trois-lk  "  (Tit.  xvn,  xin). 

*  Tit.  xvra,  v.  *  Ibid.,  xiv.  «  Ibid.,  xvi,  xm. 


JOUBERT  41 

Joubert  is  of  course  consistent  in  his  severe  hand- 
ling of  the  two  great  leaders  of  eighteenth  century 
thought,  Voltaire  and  Rousseau.  He  can,  to  be  sure, 
imagine  good  coming  from  a  reformed  Rousseau,  but 
can  conceive  of  no  circumstances  in  which  a  Voltaire 
would  be  of  any  profit.1 "  Voltaire,"  he  says, "  would  have 
read  patiently  thirty  or  forty  folio  volumes  to  find  in 
them  one  little  irreligious  jest.  That  was  his  passion, 
his  ambition,  his  mania." 2  Yet  in  the  final  analysis  the 
irreligion  of  Voltaire  is  a  less  insidious  danger  than 
the  pseudo-religion  of  Rousseau.  "  I  speak  to  tender, 
to  ardent,  to  lofty  spirits,  to  spirits  born  with  one  of 
these  distinctive  characteristics  of  religion,  and  I  say  to 
them  :  Only  J.  J.  Rousseau  can  detach  you  from  religion 
and  nothing  but  religion  can  cure  you  of  J.  J.  Rous- 
seau." 3 

If  Joubert  leans  too  much  to  the  side  of  reaction  in 
his  politics  and  religion  he  preserves  in  the  main  a  re- 
markable poise  in  his  literary  opinions.  He  was  placed 
between  an  age  that  had  been  rational  in  a  way  to  dis- 
credit the  reason  and  an  age  that  was  going  to  be  im- 
aginative in  a  way  to  discredit  the  imagination.  He 
protests  against  the  excess  of  the  past  and  utters  a  warn- 
ing against  the  excess  that  was  to  come.  Yet  nothing 
would  give  a  falser  notion  of  Joubert's  work  than  to 
look  on  it  primarily  as  a  warning  or  a  protest,  or  upon 
his  role  as  only  negative  and  restrictive.  For  the  French 
he  is  not  merely  the  author  of  the  "  Pensees  "  but,  along 
with  Fontanes,  the  literary  mentor  of  Chateaubriand. 

1  Tit.  xxiv,  xxxviii.  8  Ibid.,  xxv.  *  Ibid.,  L. 


42  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Now  of  these  two  "  guardian  angels  "  of  Chateaubriand, 
as  Sainte-Beuve  calls  them,  Joubert  was  the  one  who 
inspired  and  encouraged,  whereas  Fontanes  was  rather 
inclined  to  caution  and  hold  back.  In  his  attacks  on 
formalism,  in  his  plea  for  hospitality  of  mind  and  feel- 
ing, Joubert  had  his  face  turned  towards  the  future. 
Ayons  le  coeur  et  V esprit  hospitallers —  this  one  phrase 
sums  up  about  all  that  is  legitimate  in  the  new  criticism. 
The  eighteenth  century  had  wrought  harm  to  poetry, 
partly  by  imposing  a  mechanical  imitation,  partly  by  the 
abuse  of  rationalism.  Joubert  is  constantly  vindicating 
the  claims  of  the  imagination  against  both  the  formal- 
ists and  the  rationalists.  "Nothing  that  does  not  en- 
rapture is  poetry ;  the  lyre  is  so  to  speak  a  winged 
instrument." l  No  view  of  life  is  sound  that  lacks  imag- 
inative wholeness.  "  Whatever  we  think,  we  must  think 
with  our  whole  selves,  soul  and  body,"  2  and  above  all 
avoid  one-sidedness.  "Man  is  an  immense  being  in  some 
sort,  who  may  exist  partially  but  whose  existence  is  de- 
lectable in  proportion  as  it  becomes  full  and  complete." 3 
It  would  not  be  easy  to  find  an  utterance  more  satisfying 
than  this  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  humanist.  Above 
all  Joubert  is  severe  upon  the  one-sided  intellectualists 
(and  here  again  his  animus  against  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury appears).  Philosophers  fall  into  unreality  from 
"  confounding  what  is  spiritual  with  what  is  abstract."4 
He  warns  us  to  distrust  words  in  philosophical  books 
that  "  have  not  become  generally  current  and  are  fit 

1  Tit.  xxi,  ix.  3  Ibid.,  ix,  LH. 

8  Ibid.,  v,  LVH.  *  Ibid.,  XH,  vi. 


JOUBERT  43 

only  to  form  a  special  dialect."  l  "  How  many  people 
become  abstract  in  order  to  appear  profound  !  Most 
abstract  terms  are  shadows  concealing  voids."  2  Philo- 
sophy should  "  have  a  Muse  and  not  be  a  mere  reasoning 
shop."3 

Joubert,  it  should  be  added,  was  himself  a  man  of 
wide  philosophical  reading.  He  was  one  of  the  first 
Frenchmen  to  make  a  thorough  study  of  Kant,  whom 
he  read  in  the  Latin  translation  —  "a  German  Latin," 
he  writes  Madame  de  Beaumont,  "  as  hard  as  pebbles." 
Getting  at  Kant's  ideas  is  like  cracking  ostrich  eggs  with 
one's  head  and  then  most  often  finding  nothing  in 
them.4  "  A  man,"  Joubert  remarks,  "  may  sprain  his  mind 
as  well  as  his  body,"  and  he  seems  to  have  suffered  a  sort 
of  intellectual  sprain  from  reading  this  Latin  translation 
of  Kant.  His  final  judgment  on  Kant  is  that  he  was  in- 
tellectual where  he  should  have  been  intuitive  and  so 
"missed  the  true  measure  of  all  things."5 

Joubert,  according  to  Chateaubriand,  wanted  his  phi- 
losophy to  be  at  the  same  time  painting  and  poetry.  A 
philosophical  thought,  as  Joubert  believed,  when  it  got 
thoroughly  matured  lost  its  abstract  rawness,  as  it  were, 
and  took  on  atmosphere,  form,  sound,  light,  color.  Pos- 
sibly his  unwillingness  to  speak  abstractly,  even  when 
abstraction  is  plainly  indicated,  is  responsible  for  the 
somewhat  over-luxuriant  metaphor,  the  effect  of  pre~ 


1  Tit.  XII,  XXV.          a  Ibid.,  xn,  TYYTT,          8  /J^  VI.          4  (7^  62. 

6  He  goes  on  to  say  that  "  la  mesure  de  toutes  choses  est  VimmobUe 
poor  le  mobile,  riiifini  pour  le  limite,  le  meme  pour  le  changeant,  Veternel 
pour  le  passager"  etc.  (Cor.,  p.  61).  For  his  views  of  Kant  see  also  Pen- 
tees,  Tit.  xxiv,  xvn-xix. 


44  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ciosite,  that  I  have  already  noted  in  some  of  the 
"  Thoughts."  He  seems  very  modern  in  his  insistence 
that  words  should  not  be  treated  as  mere  algebraic  signs 
after  the  fashion  of  the  eighteenth  century,  that  they 
should  not  be  robbed,  so  to  speak,  of  their  aura  of  sug- 
gestiveness.  He  felt  and  encouraged  the  subtle  emotional 
interplay  and  blending  of  the  different  arts  that  was  to 
figure  so  largely  in  the  romantic  movement.  "  Beautiful 
verses,"  to  quote  one  of  his  many  utterances  on  this 
subject,  "  are  exhaled  like  sounds  and  perfumes,"  1  and 
this  should  seem  good  doctrine  to  a  follower  of  Verlaine. 
"  We  should  not  portray  objects,"  to  cite  another  ad- 
vanced saying,  "  but  our  feelings  about  objects";2  and 
this  should  satisfy  even  a  post-impressionist. 

But  Joubert  was  careful  to  follow  his  own  rule  and 
never  utter  a  truth  without  at  the  same  time  putting 
forth  its  complementary  truth.3  He  did  not,  like  so 
many  moderns,  go  mad  over  the  powers  of  suggestive- 
ness.  After  speaking  of  nous  qui  chantons  avec  des 
pensees  et  peignons  avec  des  paroles, 4  after  saying  that 
when  "  you  understand  a  word  perfectly,  it  becomes,  as 
it  were,  transparent,  you  see  its  color  and  form,  you 
feel  its  weight,"  etc.,  he  admits  that  the  main  thing  in 
a  word  is  not  its  color  or  its  music,  but  its  meaning ; 
and  that  when  words  are  so  chosen  and  arranged  as  to 
express  the  meaning  most  clearly,  they  are  likely  also 
to  seem  the  most  harmonious. 5  "  What  is  wanted,"  he 
says,  "  is  not  merely  the  poetry  of  images  but  the  poetry 

1  Tit.  xxi,  xxv.  2  Ibid.,  xxra,  LXXVH.        8  Ibid.,  xi,  xvra. 

4  Ibid.,  XXH,  LXXTV.       6  Ibid.,  xxii,  xxix. 


JOUBERT  45 

of  ideas." l  "  When  the  image  masks  the  object,  and  you 
make  of  the  shadow  a  body,  when  expression  gives  such 
pleasure  that  you  no  longer  tend  to  pass  beyond,  to 
penetrate  to  the  meaning,  when  the  figure  in  fine  ab- 
sorbs the  whole  of  your  attention,  you  are  held  up  on 
the  way  and  the  road  is  taken  for  the  goal,  because  a 
bad  guide  is  conducting  you." 2  This  hits  severely  many 
of  the  French  romanticists,  Gautier  certainly,  and  I 
should  not  hesitate  to  add,  Hugo. 

Unfortunately  the  French  romanticists  could  scarcely 
have  agreed  with  Joubert  about  the  goal  of  poetry,  for 
their  enthusiasm  was  not  like  his,  Platonic,  but  Rous- 
seauistic,  that  is,  they  sought  to  escape  from  abstrac- 
tion, not  by  rising  above  the  ordinary  intellectual  level, 
but  by  sinking  beneath  it;  and  so  the  romantic  move- 
ment turned  in  the  main  not  to  the  legitimate  revival 
of  the  imagination  that  Joubert  desired,  but  to  the 
glorification  of  an  unchecked  spontaneity.  Joubert' s 
actual  use  of  the  word  enthusiasm  might  be  made  the 
subject  of  an  interesting  study.  To  what  often  goes  by 
that  name  he  applies  some  other  word  — passion,  verve, 
entrailles,  or  the  like.  True  enthusiasm  in  his  sense  is 
not  associated  with  heat  and  movement  as  in  Madame 
de  Stael,  but  with  light  and  serenity,3  and  might  best  be 
defined,  says  Sainte-Beuve,  as  "exalted  peace."  And  so 
Joubert  reserves  the  word  for  the  great  poets,  the  saints 
and  the  sages.  He  speaks,  for  example,  of  the  enthu- 
siasm of  Virgil. 

Perhaps  the  difference  between  the  two  types  of  en- 

1  Tit.  xxi,  xxm.         a  Ibid.,  YYIT,  ex.         *  Ibid.,  xxm,  cvin. 


46  MODERN  FKENCH  CRITICISM 

thusiasts,  the  Platonist  and  the  Rousseauist,  comes  out 
most  clearly  in  the  use  they  would  make  of  imaginative 
illusion.  Joubert  is  nowhere  more  original  than  in  his 
ideas  about  the  role  of  illusion  in  life  and  art.  Here  if 
anywhere  he  justifies  his  boast  that  he  is  more  Platonic 
than  Plato  (Platone  platonior}.  He  defends  art  and 
literature  against  Plato  by  arguments  that  are  them- 
selves highly  Platonic.  The  artist  should  not  be  satis- 
fied with  copying  the  objects  of  sense,  for  in  that  case 
his  works  would  fall  under  Plato's  censure  of  being  at 
two  removes  from  reality,  mere  "  shadows  of  a  shadow 
world."  He  should,  on  the  contrary,  so  use  the  objects 
of  sense  as  to  adumbrate  a  higher  reality ;  so  as  to  pro- 
duce a  cast,  a  hollow  cast  as  it  were,  of  a  heavenly  arche- 
type.1 Now  this  adumbration  of  a  higher  reality  can 
only  be  achieved  by  the  medium  of  imaginative  illusion. 
By  imaginative  illusion  communication  may  be  estab- 
lished between  the  reality  of  sense  and  the  reality  of 
spirit.  We  may  be  made  to  "  imagine  souls  by  the  means 
of  bodies." 2  "  Heaven,  seeing  that  there  were  many 
truths  which  by  our  nature  we  could  not  know,  and  which 
it  was  to  our  interest,  nevertheless,  not  to  be  ignorant 
of,  took  pity  on  us  and  granted  us  the  faculty  of  imag- 
ining them." 3  We  can  perceive  the  truth  in  this  sense 

1  Tit.  xxi,  ii. 

3  Tit.  xx,  XLV.  Joubert  distinguishes  sharply  between  I'imagination,  an 
active  and  creative  faculty,  the  sole  intermediary  between  intellect  and 
spirit,  and  possessed  in  a  high  degree  only  by  the  gifted  individual ;  and 
^imaginative,  a  sub-rational  and  passive  faculty,  that  may  manifest  itself 
very  strongly  in  children,  timid  people,  etc.  See  Tit.  in,  XLVI-LII. 

8  Cor.,  85. 


JOUBERT  47 

only  through  a  veil  of  illusion,  and  it  is  the  grace  of 
the  truth  to  be  thus  veiled.1  This  intimate  blending  of 
illusion  and  wisdom  is  the  charm  of  life  and  of  art.2 
"  God  deceives  us  perpetually  and  wishes  us  to  be  de- 
ceived ;  and  when  I  say  that  he  deceives  us,"  Joubert 
adds,  "  I  mean  by  illusions  and  not  by  frauds." 3  Illu- 
sion thus  conceived  becomes  an  integral  part  of  reality,4 
and  we  must  not  strive  to  see  anything  in  its  nakedness ; 
—  il  nefaut  rien  voir  tout  nu.5 

There  are  evidently  two  extremes,  that  of  Dean  Swift, 
for  example,  who  would  tear  all  the  veils  from  human 
nature  and  look  on  it  without  illusion,  and  that  of  Rous- 
seau who  would  take  the  illusion  and  leave  the  reality 
(at  least  as  Joubert  would  understand  this  word).  In  both 
cases  the  end  was  misanthropy.  A  comparison  might  in- 
deed be  made  between  Swift  and  Rousseau  so  as  to  il- 
lustrate in  a  curious  way  the  maxim  that  extremes  meet. 

Joubert  has  remarks  of  extraordinary  penetration  not 
only  on  the  right  use  of  imaginative  illusion,  but  on  its 
misuse  by  the  Rousseauists,  on  what  one  may  call  the 
false  illusion  of  decadence.  If  Rousseau  did  not  relate 
illusion  to  the  reality  of  spirit,  he  did  relate  it  in  a  way 
to  the  reality  of  sense;  he  used  it  to  throw  a  sort  of 
glamour  over  earthly  impulse,  especially  the  master  im- 
pulse of  sex.6  In  his  attitude  towards  this  master  impulse, 
Joubert  not  only  departs  from  Rousseau,  but  is  one  of 
the  least  Gallic  of  Frenchmen.  "  By  chastity,"  he  says, 
1  Tit.  xi,  xxxvi. 

3  Tit.  ix,  v.  Cf .  Tit.  xx,  x  and  Tit.  xxra,  cxv. 

8  Cor.,  125.  «  Tit.  xi,  xxxix.  6  Tit.  xxr,  xxi. 

•  I  have  treated  this  topic  more  fully  in  The  New  Laokoon,  ch.  V. 


48  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

"  the  soul  breathes  a  pure  air  in  the  most  corrupt  places, 
by  continence  it  is  strong  whatever  may  be  the  state  of 
the  body;  it  is  royal  by  its  empire  over  the  senses;  it  is 
fair  by  its  light  and  peace."  1  Reason  may  suffice  for  or- 
dinary virtues,  according  to  Joubert,  but  religion  alone 
can  make  us  chaste. 2 

Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre  not  only  exalted  passion  a  la 
Rousseau,  says  Joubert,  but  threw  a  pseudo-idealistic 
glamour  over  the  whole  of  nature.  The  result  is  a  sort 
of  "  ecstatic  epicureanism,  a  gravely  Anacreontic  moral- 
ity." 3  "  There  is  in  the  style  of  Bernardin  de  Saint-Pierre 
a  prism  that  wearies  the  eyes ;  when  you  have  read  him 
a  long  time  you  are  charmed  to  see  that  verdure  and 
trees  are  less  highly  colored  in  the  country  than  in  his 
writings.  His  harmonies  make  us  love  the  dissonances 
that  he  banished  from  the  world  and  that  you  find  in  it 
at  every  step.  Nature,  it  is  true,  has  its  music ;  but  luck- 
ily it  is  rare.  If  reality  offered  the  melodies  that  these 
gentlemen  find  everywhere  you  would  live  in  an  ecstatic 
languor  and  die  in  a  swoon."4 

A  question  of  some  delicacy  presents  itself, — how 
did  Joubert  deal  with  the  Rousseauism  of  Chateaubri- 
and? "When  my  friends  have  only  one  eye,"  says  Jou- 
bert, "  I  look  at  them  in  profile." 5  But  it  is  plain  that 
criticism  did  not  lose  its  rights  even  in  the  case  of  his 
friends.  "Chateaubriand,"  he  says,  "has  given  to  the 
passions  an  innocence  they  do  not  have,  or  that  they 
have  only  once.  In  'Atala'  the  passions  are  covered 

1  Tit.  v,  ex.  2  Ibid.,  cxn.  8  Tit.  xxiv,  LXVI. 

4  Ibid.,  LXVII.  6  Pensees,  p.  2. 


JOUBERT  49 

with  long  white  veils."1  The  letter  that  he  wrote  to 
Mole 2  about  the  character  of  Chateaubriand  is  a  master- 
piece of  psychological  analysis.  In  this  letter  Joubert 
anticipates  some  of  the  severest  judgments  of  Sainte- 
Beuve,  and  at  the  same  time  contrives  to  seem  not  only 
amiable  but  affectionate.  Joubert  is  not  in  the  least  a 
"  beautiful  soul "  in  the  romantic  sense  with  all  the  flab- 
biness  that  the  phrase  implies.  We  are  asked  to  accept 
about  everything  nowadays  on  the  ground  that  other- 
wise we  shall  show  ourselves  narrow  and  unsympathetic. 
"I  love  few  pictures,"  Joubert  replies,  "  few  operas,  few 
statues,  few  poems,  and  yet  I  am  a  great  lover  of  the 
arts." 

In  other  words,  sympathy  must  be  ideally  combined 
with  selection,  which  means  in  practice  that  expansion 
must  be  tempered  by  concentration,  that  vital  impulse 
must  be  submitted  to  vital  control.  When  Joubert  was 
told  that  a  great  many  passions  are  required  in  litera- 
ture, "  Yes,"  he  replied,  "  a  great  many  restrained  pas- 
sions." 3  I  have  already  quoted  his  charge  that  Rousseau 
ruined  morality  by  turning  the  conscience  itself  into  a 
passion,  by  making  it  not  a  bridle  but  a  spur ;  and  Jou- 
bert adds  that  "  taste  is  the  literary  conscience  of  the 
soul." 4  Now  taste,  like  most  other  desirable  things,  is 
dualistic  in  its  nature,  is  a  mediation  between  extremes; 
but  the  selective  and  restrictive  aspect  of  taste  that  Jou- 

1  Pensees,  p.  393. 

8  Cor.,  106  ff.  Sainte-Beuve  says  of  this  letter  that  "  la  psychologic  de 
Chateaubriand  y  est  coulee  k  fond."  (Chateaubriand,  u,  396)  ;  cf.  also 
Nouveaux  Lundis,  ni,  11. 

8  Tit.  xxiii,  cxxxi.  *  Ibid.,  xxni,  CXLVH. 


50  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

bert  emphasizes  is  not  only  the  most  important  in  itself, 
but  it  is  the  aspect  which  the  moderns  from  Rousseau 
to  Signor  Croce  have  most  persistently  neglected  and 
denied.  We  have  seen  that  Madame  de  Stael  tended  to 
identify  genius  with  taste,  and  to  make  both  purely  ex- 
pansive. Joubert  inclines  rather  to  the  extreme  of  con- 
centration. "If  there  is  a  man,"  he  writes,  "tormented 
by  the  accursed  ambition  to  put  a  whole  book  in  a  page, 
a  whole  page  in  a  phrase,  and  that  phrase  in  a  word,  it 
is  I."  *  "  The  ancient  critics  said :  Plus  offendit  nimium 
quamparum.  We  have  almost  inverted  this  maxim  by 
bestowing  praise  on  every  form  of  abundance." 2  Jou- 
bert attacks  repeatedly  another  closely  related  natural- 
istic vice,  the  worship  of  mere  force  or  energy,  the  liter- 
ary Napoleonism  of  which  Sainte-Beuve  accused  Balzac. 
"  Without  delicacy,"  says  Joubert,  "  there  is  no  litera- 
ture." 3  "  To  write  well  a  man  should  have  a  natural 
facility  and  an  acquired  difficulty." 4  We  are  more  famil- 
iar perhaps  with  the  exact  opposite,  with  the  man  who 
had  little  natural  facility,  but  who  has  at  least  succeeded 
in  acquiring  the  sterile  abundance  of  the  journalist. 
Joubert  has  not  a  trace  of  our  modern  megalomania. 
"  What  is  exquisite  is  better  than  what  is  ample.  Mer- 
chants revere  big  books,  but  readers  love  little  ones," 
etc. 5  Heureux  est  Vecrivain  qui  pent  faire  un  beau 
petit  livre* 

Though  Joubert  was  in  a  high  degree  judicial  and 
selective,  the  standards  by  which  he  judged  and  selected 

1  Pensees,  p.  8.  *  Tit.  xvin,  LXXXVIII.        s  Ibid.,  xxni,  xxiv. 

*  Hid.,  XLV.  *  Ibid.,  xxiu,  ccxx.  6  Ibid.,  ccxxn. 


JOUBERT  51 

were  not  formal,  but  intuitive.  "  Professional  critics," 
he  says,  expressing  his  disdain  for  the  formalists,  "  can 
distinguish  and  appreciate  neither  uncut  diamonds  nor 
gold  in  the  bar.  They  are  merchants  and  know  in  liter- 
ature only  the  coins  which  have  currency.  Their  criti- 
cism has  balances  and  scales  but  neither  crucible  nor 
touchstone." 1  That  was  the  difficulty  with  La  Harpe ;  he 
knew  the  rules,  but  not  the  reason  which  is  the  rule  of  the 
rules,  and  which  determines  at  once  their  limit  and  their 
extent.  He  knew  the  trade  but  not  the  art  of  criticism.2 

Though  he  possessed  the  critical  touchstone  of  which 
he  speaks  I  am  not  setting  up  Joubert  himself  as  infal- 
lible —  that  would  be  to  accord  him  privileges  too  far 
beyond  our  common  humanity.  That  he  could  be  insuf- 
ficiently on  his  guard  against  formalism  even  in  poetry 
where  he  is  usually  most  at  home,  is  shown  by  his  com- 
parison of  Milton  with  the  Abbe  Delille,3  which  is  not 
only  bad  but  almost  monumental  in  its  badness.  Per- 
haps his  blindness  here  is  an  instance  of  the  potency  of 
the  Zeitgeist  which  he  was  one  of  the  first  to  define 
adequately.4 

Still  his  critical  intuition  puts  him  on  his  guard  as  a 
rule  even  against  the  Zeitgeist.  Perhaps  indeed  Joubert 
may  be  most  adequately  defined  in  contradistinction  to 
the  formalist,  as  the  intuitive  critic.  But  in  that  case  we 
shall  need  to  define  with  some  care  the  word  intuition. 
The  intellect  is  evidently  dependent  on  intuition,  as  was 

1  Tit.  xxm,  CXLV.  2  Ibid.,  xxrv,  LIV. 

8  Cor.,  251.  It  is  only  fair  to  add  that  Joubert  did  not  read  English. 

4  Tit.  xvi,  L. 


52  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

pointed  out  long  ago  by  Aristotle,  for  its  knowledge 
both  of  what  is  below  and  what  is  above  itself.  We  may 
therefore  distinguish  two  main  orders  of  intuitions  cor- 
responding closely  to  the  two  main  types  of  enthusiasm 
we  have  already  defined  :  on  the  one  hand,  the  sensuous 
or  aesthetic,  and  on  the  other,  the  spiritual,  or  as  they 
are  sometimes  termed  the  intellectual,  intuitions.  Intui- 
tions of  the  Many  and  intuitions  of  the  One,  we  may 
also  call  them,  making  themselves  felt  respectively,  to 
repeat  a  contrast  I  have  already  used,  as  vital  impulse 
and  vital  control.  We  may  speak,  for  instance,  of  the 
intuition  of  an  Emerson ;  we  may  also  apply  the  word  to 
the  aesthetic  sensitiveness,  the  fine  literary  perception 
of  a  Charles  Lamb.  M.  Lemaitre  says  that  Joubert  was 
a  singuliere  et  delicieuse  creature,  but  he  does  not  make 
especially  clear  why  Joubert  was  "  singular  "  and  "  de- 
licious." The  reason,  as  it  seems  to  me,  is  that  he  was 
intuitive  in  both  of  the  main  senses  I  have  defined.  Like 
Emerson  he  possessed  "  the  gift  of  vision,  the  eye  of  the 
spirit,  the  instinct  of  penetration,  prompt  discernment ; 
in  fine,  natural  sagacity  in  discovering  all  that  is  spirit- 
ual." l  Hazlitt  says  that  Lamb  tried  old  authors  on  his 
palate  as  epicures  taste  olives.  So  did  Joubert.  It  would 
be  almost  needless  to  multiply  examples  of  his  literary 
perceptiveness.2 

1  Tit.  in,  XLFV. 

2  Chateaubriand  has  a  simnlar  combination  of  qualities  in  mind  when 
he  says  more  ambitiously  that  Joubert  was  a  "  Platon  a  cceur  de  La  Fon- 
taine." Joubert  was,  by  the  way,  the  first  to  point  out  that  "  II  y  a,  dans 
La  Fontaine,  une  plenitude  de  podsie  qu'on  ne  trouve  nulle  part  dans  lea 
autres  auteurs  f  rancais  "  (Tit.  xxrv,  sect,  v,  xx) —  an  opinion  since  adopted 
by  Sainte-Beuve,  Amiel,  and  Matthew  Arnold. 


JOUBERT  53 

Moreover  he  never  confuses,  like  so  many  mere 
aesthetes,  the  planes  of  being  corresponding  to  the  dif- 
ferent orders  of  intuitions.  Men  have  always  been  con- 
scious of  the  contrast  between  the  rational  and  the  in- 
tuitive sides  of  human  nature,  a  contrast  that  pervades 
the  literature  of  the  world  as  that  between  the  head  and 
the  heart.  But  the  word  heart  is  evidently  subject  to  the 
same  ambiguity  as  the  word  intuition  itself.  When  Pascal, 
for  example,  says  that  the  "  heart  has  reasons  of  which 
the  reason  knows  nothing,"  he  evidently  refers  to  the 
super-sensuous  or  spiritual  intuitions.  When  La  Roche- 
foucauld, on  the  other  hand,  says  that  the  "  head  is  al- 
ways the  dupe  of  the  heart,"  he  evidently  refers  to  the 
desires  and  impulses  that  rise  like  a  cloud  about  the 
intellect  from  the  sub-rational  region  of  human  nature. 
A  comparative  study  might  be  made  between  Rous- 
seau and  Pascal  in  such  a  way  as  to  show  that,  though 
both  writers  make  everything  hinge  upon  the  heart, 
they  attach  to  the  word  heart  entirely  different  mean- 
ings because  they  use  it  to  describe  different  orders  of 
intuition. 

These  distinctions  seem  especially  needed  at  present 
when  the  thinkers  who  have  the  attention  of  the  world, 
thinkers  like  James  and  M.  Bergson  and  Signor  Croce, 
are  all  agreed  at  least  in  appealing  from  intellect  to  in- 
tuition. If  Joubert  has  so  little  in  common  with  these 
thinkers,  it  is  plainly  because  they  are  intuitive  only  in 
the  Rousseauistic  sense,  and  not  like  him  in  the  Platonic 
sense  as  well.  James  and  M.  Bergson  do  not,  like  Jou- 
bert, look  on  the  One  as  a  living  intuition,  but  as  an  in- 


54  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ert  intellectual  concept;  and  they  would  have  us  believe 
that  we  can  escape  from  this  intellectualism  only  by  div- 
ing into  the  flux,  —  in  other  words  by  cultivating  our 
intuitions  of  the  Many.  It  is  to  be  feared  that  Joubert 
would  have  said  of  this  modern  philosophy  what  he  said 
of  the  philosophy  of  change  in  the  form  it  had  assumed 
in  his  own  time :  "  I  detest  these  horrible  maxims  as  the 
ancient  sages  would  have  done." J  He  looked  with  sus- 
picion on  philosophies  which,  so  far  from  throwing  light 
on  previous  philosophies,  simply  contradict  them ; 2  and 
from  this  point  of  view,  he  would  have  looked  with  spe- 
cial suspicion  on  M.  Bergson.  For  if  M.  Bergson's  con- 
ception of  reality  be  correct,  most  of  the  great  philoso- 
phers of  the  past,  beginning  with  Plato  and  Aristotle, 
have  had,  not  merely  a  mistaken,  but  an  absolutely  in- 
verted view  of  reality. 

To  say  that  Joubert  is  spiritually  intuitive  is  to  put 
him  in  the  class  of  sages;  a  class,  the  representatives  of 
which  are  recognizable  through  the  infinitely  diverse 
accidents  of  time  and  space  by  their  agreement  on  essen- 
tials. It  would,  for  example,  be  easy  to  collect  a  list  of 
parallel  passages  from  Joubert  and  Emerson.  "When 
there  is  born  in  a  nation,"  says  Joubert,  "  an  individual 
capable  of  producing  a  great  thought,  another  one  is 
born  capable  of  understanding  it  and  admiring  it."  Here 
is  Emerson's  favorite  doctrine  that  "the  hearing  ear  is 
always  found  close  to  the  speaking  tongue."  The  follow- 
ing thought,  the  equivalent  of  which  might  also  be  found 
in  Emerson,  we  should  be  justified  in  calling  Buddhistic, 
1  Cor.,  257.  a  Tit.  xii,  LIV. 


JOUBERT  55 

especially  if  we  remember  that  the  very  name  Buddha 
means  the  Awakened:  "How  many  people  eat,  drink 
and  get  married;  buy,  sell  and  build;  make  contracts 
and  attend  to  their  fortune;  have  friends  and  enemies, 
pleasures  and  pains ;  are  born,  grow  up,  live  and  die, — 
but  asleep ! "  l  Men  tend  to  come  together  in  proportion 
to  their  intuitions  of  the  One ;  in  other  words  the  true 
unifying  principle  of  mankind  is  found  in  the  insight  of 
its  sages.  We  ascend  to  meet. 

Possibly  the  contrast  between  the  intuitiveness  of 
Joubert  and  the  sages  and  that  of  M.  Bergson  may  be 
brought  out  most  clearly  by  comparing  their  attitude 
towards  time.  Reality  is  a  pure  process  of  flux  and  change 
according  to  M.  Bergson,  and  this  change  takes  place  in 
time ;  so  that  "  time  is  the  very  stuff  of  which  our  lives 
are  made."  2  We  should  strive  to  see  things  not  sub 
specie  aeternitatis,  but  sub  specie  durationis.  Under 
how  many  forms,  under  what  diverse  conditions  of  time 
and  space,  would  it  be  possible  to  find  the  opposite  asser- 
tion !  "The  sage  is  delivered  from  time," 3  says  Buddha. 
"Happy  is  the  soul  in  which  time  no  longer  courses !  " 
says  Michael  Angelo.  "  Time,"  says  Joubert,  "measured 
here  below  by  the  succession  of  beings  which  are  con- 
stantly changing  and  being  renewed,  is  seen  and  felt, 
and  reckoned  and  exists.  Higher  up  there  is  no  change 
or  succession,  or  new  or  old,  or  yesterday  or  to-morrow." 4 
(Elsewhere  Joubert  adds  that  there  is  time  even  in  eter- 
nity, though  not  a  terrestrial  and  earthly  time  which  is 

1  Tit.  vn,  LXIII.  8  UEvolution  creatrice. 

8  "  Akappiyo."  See  Sutta-Nipata,  rv,  10.      *  Tit.  xin,  rv. 


56  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

counted  by  the  movement  and  succession  of  bodies.1) 
Emerson  affirms  in  somewhat  similar  fashion  of  "the 
core  of  God's  abysm":  — 

"  There  Past,  Present,  Future  shoot 
Triple  blossoms  from  one  root." 

And  so  we  might  lengthen  indefinitely  the  list  of  those 
•who  have  found  their  supreme  reality,  not  like  M.  Berg- 
son  in  time,  but  in  transcending  time. 

If  a  man  becomes  a  sage  only  by  being  spiritually  in- 
tuitive, it  is  highly  desirable,  and  indeed  necessary,  if  he 
is  to  be  a  critic  or  creator  of  art  and  literature,  that  he 
should  also  be  intuitive  in  the  sense  M.  Bergson  recom- 
mends. Perhaps,  indeed,  the  wisest  man  is  he  who  has  both 
orders  of  intuitions  and  then  mediates  between  them ; 
who  joins  to  his  sense  of  unity  a  fine  perception  of  the 
local,  the  individual,  the  transitory.  Joubert's  quality  as 
a  critic  is  revealed  especially  by  the  fact  that  he  not 
only  had  standards  but  held  them  fluidly.  His  insistence 
on  the  fixed  and  the  permanent  is  nearly  always  tem- 
pered by  the  sense  of  change  and  instability.  "  A  man 
must  provide  himself,"  he  says,  in  his  highly  metaphor- 
ical fashion,  "with  anchors  and  ballast,  that  is,  with  fixed 
and  constant  opinions,  and  then  he  should  allow  the  ban- 
ners to  float  free  and  the  sails  to  swell ;  the  mast  alone 
should  remain  unshaken."2  Again:  "Truth  in  one's 
style  is  an  indispensable  virtue  and  sufficient  to  recom- 
mend a  writer.  If  on  every  manner  of  subject  we  wished 
to  write  nowadays  as  people  wrote  in  the  time  of 

1  Tit.  VI.  J  Tit.  DC,  XLH. 


JOUBERT  57 

Louis  XIV  we  should  have  no  truth  in  our  style,  for  we 
no  longer  have  the  same  humors,  the  same  opinions,  the 
same  manners.  .  .  .  The  more  the  genre  in  which  you 
write  is  related  to  your  character,  to  the  manners  of  the 
age,  the  more  your  style  should  depart  from  that  of 
writers  who  have  been  models  only  because  they  excelled 
in  expressing  in  their  works  either  the  manners  of  their 
epoch  or  their  own  character.  Good  taste  itself  in  this 
case  allows  you  to  depart  from  the  best  taste,  for  taste 
changes  with  manners,  even  good  taste."  Yet  Joubert 
adds  (and  here,  perhaps,  the  reactionary  note  appears), 
that  there  are  genres  that  do  not  change.  "  I  think  that 
the  sacred  orator  would  always  do  well  to  write  and  think 
as  Bossuet  would  have  thought  and  written." *  "  The 
vogue  of  books,"  he  writes  in  another  passage,  "de- 
pends on  the  taste  of  different  centuries ;  even  what  is 
old  is  exposed  to  variations  of  fashion.  Corneille  and 
Racine,  Virgil  and  Lucan,  Seneca  and  Cicero,  Tacitus 
and  Livy,  Aristotle  and  Plato,  have  had  the  palm  only 
in  turn.  Nay  more :  in  the  same  life,  according  to  the 
ages,  in  the  same  year  according  to  the  seasons,  and 
sometimes  in  the  same  day  according  to  the  hours,  we 
prefer  one  book  to  another  book,  one  style  to  another 
style,  one  intellect  to  another  intellect." 2  "  In  literature 
and  in  established  judgments  on  authors,"  says  Joubert, 
in  language  that  anticipates  Anatole  France,  "  there  is 
more  conventional  opinion  than  truth.  How  many  books, 
whose  reputation  is  made,  would  fail  to  achieve  this 
reputation  if  it  had  to  be  won  again !  " 3 
1  Tit.  xxir,  Lxxm.  *  Tit.  xxni,  cutxvn.  8  Tit.  xxm,  CLXXXIV. 


58  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Though  Joubert  is  thus  willing  to  concede  a  great 
deal  to  the  element  of  relativity  he  is  not  ready  to  go 
to  the  point  of  seeing  in  literature  merely  an  expression 
of  society.  "  It  is  a  hundred  times  better,"  he  says,  "  to 
suit  a  work  to  the  nature  of  the  human  spirit  than  to 
what  is  called  the  state  of  society.  There  is  something 
unchanging  in  man ;  and  that  is  why  there  are  unchang- 
ing rules  in  the  arts  and  in  works  of  art,  beauties  which 
will  always  please  or  modes  of  expression  that  will  give 
pleasure  only  for  a  short  time." 1  H  y  a  quelque  chose 
d'immuable  dans  I'homme!  The  writers  who  are 
themselves  likely  to  endure  are  those  who,  like  Joubert, 
really  perceived  this  enduring  something  in  man  and 
aimed  at  it.  "Heaven,"  as  he  says,  "is  for  those  who 
think  about  it."  It  is  equally  appropriate  that  the  work 
of  Madame  de  Stael,  whose  main  interest  was  not  in  this 
essential  aspect  of  literature,  but  in  literature  as  the  ex- 
pression of  society,  that  is,  as  the  reflection  of  changing 
circumstances,  should  itself  count  less  intrinsically  than 
relatively  and  historically. 

Joubert  must  of  course  rank  below  those  who  were 
truly  creative,  those  who  have  left  a  definitive  monu- 
ment, who  have  had  not  only  ideas  but  also,  in  his  own 
phrase,  the  house  in  which  to  lodge  them.2  He  spent  so 
much  time  in  meditating  his  own  monument  and  in 
making  sure  of  the  materials  that  were  to  enter  into  it 
that  when  he  had  at  last  made  sure,  as  he  tells  us,  that 

1  Tit.  XXTIT,  CCV. 

2  Mes  idt'es  !  c'eat  la  maison  poor  lee  loger  qui  me  coute  &  batir  (Pen- 
sees,  p.  10). 


JOUBEKT  59 

he  had  found  what  he  wanted,  it  was  too  late,  it  was 
time  to  die.1  Yet  in  his  own  words,  "a  few  memorable 
utterances  are  enough  to  make  a  great  spirit  illustrious. 
There  are  thoughts  that  contain  the  essence  of  a  whole 
book." 2  His  own  reputation  is  likely  to  rest  securely  on 
a  number  of  thoughts  and  utterances  of  this  kind.  The 
world  cannot  afford  to  forget  him,  unless  indeed  the 
gift  of  intuition,  as  I  have  tried  to  define  it,  should 
prove  more  common  among  critics  in  the  future  than  it 
has  been  in  the  past. 

1  Tit.  VH,  LXXXTX.  a  Tit.  xxni,  ccxvn. 


Ill 

CHATEAUBRIAND 

THE  English  writer  with  whom  Chateaubriand  is  most 
often  compared,  with  whom  indeed  he  compares  himself, 
is  Byron.  The  influence  of  Byron  in  England,  however, 
was  slight  as  compared  with  his  influence  on  the  con- 
tinent, whereas  the  influence  of  Chateaubriand,  negligi- 
ble outside  of  France,  dominates  the  whole  of  modern 
French  literature.  "  Chateaubriand,"  M.  Faguet  wrote 
some  time  ago,  "is  the  greatest  date  in  the  literary  his- 
tory of  France  since  the  Pleiade.  He  ends  a  literary 
evolution  of  nearly  three  centuries  and  a  new  evolution 
taking  its  rise  in  him  still  endures  and  will  long 
continue.  .  .  .  He  is  the  man  who  renewed  the  French 
imagination." 1  Nowadays  we  should  perhaps  be  more 
inclined  to  date  the  evolution  of  which  M.  Faguet  speaks 
from  Rousseau,  and  to  look  on  Chateaubriand  himself 
as  merely  the  eldest  son  of  Jean-Jacques. 

The  relationship  to  Rousseau  is  the  common  bond 
between  Chateaubriand  and  Byron.  They  both  exhibit 
differences  from  Rousseau  due  in  large  measure  to  an 
aristocratic  rather  than  a  plebeian  origin.  They  also 
differ  from  one  another  in  that  Chateaubriand  cham- 
pioned the  Middle  Ages,  monarchy,  and  Catholicism, 
whereas  Byron  waged  war  on  authority  and  tradition, 
i  XlX'Siecle,  71. 


CHATEAUBRIAND  61 

Yet  their  resemblance  to  each  other  and  to  their  com- 
mon literary  ancestor  is  manifest  in  their  solitary  com- 
muuings  with  nature,  and  in  the  way  each  is  "  possessed 
by  the  demon  of  his  heart."  In  both  men  we  have 
Rousseauism  with  an  added  touch  of  wildness  and  mis- 
anthropy. They  both  suffer  like  Rousseau  from  an  un- 
reconciled antinomy  between  thought  and  feeling  ("  My 
heart  and  my  head  do  not  seem  to  belong  to  the  same 
individual"),  and  in  both  cases  this  opposition  appears 
strikingly  in  their  literary  opinions. 

"The  taste  of  Chateaubriand,"  says  M.  Merlet,  "was 
of  a  different  school  from  his  talent.  He  defended  tradi- 
tion by  his  doctrines,  at  the  same  time  that  he  corrupted 
or  renewed  it  by  his  example."1  In  much  the  same  fash- 
ion Byron  exalted  Pope  in  theory  while  he  was  actually 
overthrowing  the  school  of  Pope  by  his  practice.  "I 
look  upon  this  as  the  declining  age  of  English  poetry," 
he  says  in  his  letter  to  Bowles,  and  he  goes  on  to  express 
his  shame  that  he  himself  had  been  one  of  the  builders 
of  the  new  Babel.  He  and  his  fellow  romanticists  were 
sailing  splendidly  it  might  be,  but  on  the  wrong  tack. 
With  Byron  in  this  consciously  critical  vein  we  may  com- 
pare Chateaubriand  as  he  appears  in  a  passage  like  the 
following:  "Furthermore  I  am  not  like  Rousseau  an 
enthusiast  over  savages  and,  although  I  have  perhaps  as 
much  ground  to  complain  of  society  as  this  philosopher 
had  to  be  satisfied  with  it,  I  do  not  think  that  pure 
nature  is  the  most  beautiful  thing  in  the  world.  I  have 
always  found  it  very  ugly,  wherever  I  have  had  the  op- 

1  Tableau  de  la  literature  franfaise  (1800-1815),  m,  157. 


62  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

portunity  to  see  it.  Far  from  being  of  the  opinion  that 
the  man  who  thinks  is  a  depraved  animal,1  I  believe  it 
is  thought  that  makes  man.  With  this  word  nature  uni- 
versal havoc  has  been  wrought.  Let  us  paint  nature, 
but  selected  nature  (la  belle  nature).  Art  should  not 
concern  itself  with  the  imitation  of  monsters."  Chateau- 
briand has  the  assurance  to  write  this  in  the  preface  to 
"  Atala,"  a  work  in  which  he  betrays  on  every  page  his 
passion  for  the  primitive,  and  in  which,  so  far  from 
avoiding  the  monstrous  in  the  name  of  la  belle  nature, 
he  shows,  as  Sainte-Beuve  points  out,  a  special  predilec- 
tion for  crocodiles ! 

Though  according  to  his  most  recent  critic,  M.  Le- 
maitre,  he  had  strange  lacunae  in  his  own  taste  and  put 
no  serious  check  on  his  imagination,  he  had  thoughts  on 
taste  and  genius  and  the  classic  age  that  would  be 
countersigned  by  Voltaire :  "  If  genius  brings  forth,  it 
is  taste  that  preserves :  without  taste  genius  is  only  a 
sublime  folly.  Strange  circumstance  that  this  delicate 
tact  should  be  still  rarer  than  the  creative  gift !  Intel- 
lect and  genius  are  diffused  rather  evenly  throughout  the 
centuries ;  but  there  are  in  these  centuries  only  certain 
nations,  and  in  these  nations  only  certain  moments, 
in  which  taste  is  revealed  in  all  its  purity;  before  or 
afterwards  everything  offends  by  lack  or  excess." 2  He 

1  Contrast  with  this  edifying  profession  of  faith  in  reason  the  following: 
"  On  montre  k  Heidelberg  un  tonneau  de'mesure',  Colise'e  en  mine  des  ivro- 
gnes  ;  du  moms  aucun  chre'tien  n'a  perdu  la  vie  dans  cet  amphitheatre  des 
Vespasiens  du  Rhin;  la  raison,  oui :  ce  n'est  pas  grande  perte"  (Mem.  d' 
Outre-Tombe,  4  juin,  1833.) 

8  Essai  sur  la  lit.  ang. 


CHATEAUBRIAND  63 

stood  for  the  clear-cut  type  (la  distinction  des  genres 
est  nee  de  la  nature  meme),  and  yet  by  his  own  style  was 
encouraging  one  of  the  most  fundamental  of  confusions, 
that  between  prose  and  poetry.  He  did  more  than  any 
one  else  to  popularize  local  color  and  at  the  same  time 
pointed  out  its  f utility.  "  The  genius  of  Racine  borrows 
nothing  from  the  cut  of  the  clothes.  .  .  .  People  imitate 
arm-chairs  and  velvet  when  they  no  longer  know  how  to 
portray  the  character  of  the  man  seated  on  this  velvet 
and  in  these  arm-chairs."  l  Rene  mocks  at  the  malady 
of  Rene.  "  Lord  Byron,"  he  says, "  has  founded  a  deplor- 
able school.  I  presume  that  he  has  been  as  much  afflicted 
at  the  Childe  Harolds  to  whom  he  has  given  birth  as  I  am 
at  the  Renes  who  are  dreaming  about  me.  If  *  Rene '  did 
not  exist  I  should  net  write  it  again.  If  it  were  possible 
for  me  to  destroy  it  I  would  destroy  it.  Renes  in  poetry 
and  Renes  in  prose  have  sprung  up  in  swarms.  Nothing 
has  been  heard  save  disjointed  phrases  of  lamentation. 
The  only  talk  has  been  of  winds  and  storms,  of  unknown 
words  uttered  to  the  clouds  and  to  the  night.  No  scrib- 
bler just  out  of  school  who  has  n't  dreamed  that  he  is 
the  unhappiest  of  men,  no  sixteen-year-old  stripling  who 
hasn't  exhausted  life  and  thought  himself  tormented 
by  his  genius,  who  in  the  abyss  of  his  thoughts  hasn't 
given  himself  over  to  his  vaguely  aspiring  passions,"  etc.2 
Chateaubriand  attributes  to  the  classical  influence  of 
Fontanes3  the  fact  that  he  had  avoided  the  "  roughness" 

1  Essai  sur  la  lit.  ang.  a  Mem.  d'Outre-Tombe. 

8  Essai  sur  la  lit.  ang.  Cf.  Emile  Deschamps  :  — 

"  Fontanes  qui  veillait,  flambeau  pur  et  brillant, 
Comme  un  autre  Boileau,  pres  de  Chateaubriand." 


64  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

of  bis  romantic  followers.  Much,  however,  of  Chateau- 
briand's disparagement  of  Rousseau,  on  the  one  hand, 
and  of  the  romanticists,  on  the  other,  is  itself  a  romantic 
trait :  he  is  so  filled  with  the  sense  of  his  own  unique- 
ness that  he  would  acknowledge  neither  master  nor  dis- 
ciples. 

The  contradiction  between  theory  and  practice  is  even 
more  flagrant  in  Chateaubriand  than  in  Byron.  For 
Byron's  laudation  of  the  old  literary  order  actually  cor- 
responds to  something  in  his  creative  writing :  he  is 
creative  in  such  poems  as  the  "  Vision  of  Judgment" 
as  well  as  in  the  outgoings  of  his  spirit  to  the  mountains 
and  the  sea ;  he  is  in  short  a  far  less  romantic  personage 
than  Chateaubriand.  He  shows  himself  less  aloof  from 
society  than  the  Frenchman,  even  in  his  satire  of  it. 
Chateaubriand  is  thoroughly  creative  only  when  utter- 
ing his  own  nostalgia  and  nympholeptic  longings,  or 
when  rendering  suggestively  the  aspects  of  outer  nature 
(these  moods  are  of  course  often  blended).  There  was, 
in  Joubert's  phrase,  a  "  talisman "  that  clung  to  his 
fingers,  and  he  used  this  gift  of  glamour,  not  for  intel- 
lectual ends,  but  to  enrich  and  deepen  the  life  of  the 
senses.  "  He  is  the  man,"  says  M.  Lemaitre,  "  who  in- 
troduced into  French  the  most  music,  the  most  images, 
the  most  perfumes,  the  most  suave  contacts,  so  to  speak, 
and  the  most  delights,  and  who  wrote  the  most  intoxi- 
cating phrases  on  voluptuousness  and  death."  1  On  the 
creative  side  he  has  far  less  intellectual  breadth  than 
Byron,  but  is  far  superior  to  him  as  a  critic.  As  soon  as 

1  Chateaubriand,  342. 


CHATEAUBRIAND  65 

Byron  reflected,  says  Goethe,  he  was  a  child ;  and  then, 
too,  he  did  not  have  at  his  side  such  "  guardian  angels  " 
as  Fontanes  and  Joubert.  The  point  of  view  of  the 
Letter  to  Bowles  is  on  the  whole  pseudo-classic.  Now 
Chateaubriand  also  had  his  pseudo-classical  side  which 
unfortunately  overflows  at  times  into  what  should  have 
been  his  creative  writing.  He  says  in  one  of  his  ro- 
mantic moods  that  he  knew  a  Breton  folk-song  one 
line  of  which  was  worth  more  than  all  the  twelve  cantos 
of  the  "Henriade."  Yet  a  large  portion  of  his  own 
"Martyrs"  is  at  least  as  artificial  as  the  "Henriade," 
and  precisely  in  the  same  manner.  He  substitutes,  in 
fact,  a  literary  Christianity  for  a  literary  paganism,  and 
in  such  a  way  as  to  justify  Boileau's  warning  against 
the  use  of  religious  mysteries  as  vain  literary  ornaments. 
He  has  as  implicit  a  faith  in  poetic  "machines"  as 
Father  Le  Bossu,  and  in  few  pseudo-epics  is  the  creak- 
ing of  the  pullies  with  which  this  "machinery  "  is  man- 
aged so  painfully  audible  as  in  the  "  Martyrs." 

But  along  with  this  pseudo-classicism  Chateaubriand 
had  a  genuinely  classical  side,  in  other  words  a  genuine 
perception  of  form.  He  would  not  have  been  capable 
like  Byron  of  comparing  Pope  to  a  Greek  temple.  He 
can  speak  admirably  on  occasion  of  the  "  antique  sym- 
metry." l  His  protest  against  the  sentimentality  of  the 

1  As,  for  example,  in  the  following  passage :  "  Les  modernes  sont  en 
ge*ne*ral  plus  savants,  plus  delicate,  plus  dalle's,  souvent  me  me  plus  inte- 
ressants  dans  leurs  compositions  que  les  anciens  ;  mais  ceux-ci  sont  plus 
simples,  plus  augustes,  plus  tragiques,  plus  abondants  et  surtout  plus  vrais 
que  les  modernes.  Us  ont  un  gout  plus  sur,  une  imagination  plus  noble  : 
Us  ne  savent  travailler  que  1'ensemble,  et  negligent  les  ornements  ;  an 


66  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

eighteenth  century  has  often  been  cited  in  illustration 
of  his  instinct  for  the  grand  manner  :  "It  is  a  dangerous 
mistake,  sanctioned,  like  so  many  other  dangerous  mis- 
takes, by  Voltaire,  to  suppose  that  the  best  works  of 
imagination  are  those  that  draw  most  tears.  One  could 
name  this  or  that  melodrama,  which  no  one  would  like 
to  own  having  written,  and  which  yet  harrows  the  feel- 
ings far  more  than  the  '  Aeneid.'  The  true  tears  are 
those  which  are  called  forth  by  the  beauty  of  poetry ; 
there  must  be  as  much  imagination  in  them  as  sorrow. 
They  are  the  tears  which  come  to  our  eyes  when  Priam 
says  to  Achilles  :  {  And  I  have  endured,  —  the  like 
whereof  no  soul  on  earth  hath  yet  endured, —  to  carry 
to  my  lips  the  hand  of  him  who  slew  my  child ' ;  or 
when  Joseph  cries  out :  ( I  am  Joseph  your  brother 
whom  ye  sold  into  Egypt.'  "  l 

We  have  then  in  Chateaubriand  a  somewhat  baffling 
interplay  of  classical,  pseudo-classical,  and  romantic  ele- 
ments. The  only  element  that  counts,  from  the  point  of 
view  of  his  influence  even  in  criticism,  is  the  romantic. 
What  men  received  from  him  was  a  certain  type  of  im- 

berger  qui  se  plaint,  un  vieillard  qui  raconte,  un  he*ros  qui  combat  :  voila 
pour  eux  tout  un  poeme,  et  1'on  ne  salt  comment  il  arrive  que  ce  poeme, 
ou  il  n'y  a  rien,  est  cependant  mieux  rempli  que  nos  romans  charge's  d'in- 
cidents  et  de  personnages.  L'art  d'e'crire  serable  avoir  suivi  Part  de  la 
peinture  ;  la  palette  du  poete  moderne  se  couvre  d'une  variete*  infinie  de 
teintea  et  de  nuances ;  le  poete  antique  compose  ses  tableaux  avec  les 
trois  eouleurs  du  Polygnote."  (Genie  du  Chrittianisme,  2e  Partie,  livre  n, 
c.  ii.) 

1  Preface  to  Atnla.  Cf.  Arnold,  Essays  in  Criticism,  I,  277.  Coleridge 
made  a  similar  protest  against  the  theatrical  tearfulness  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  See  Lectures  on  Shakespeare  (Bohn),  124. 


CHATEAUBRIAND  67 

aginative  and  emotional  stimulus,  an  initiation  into  the 
new  passion  and  the  new  revery  and  the  new  suggest- 
iveness.  What  they  listened  to  was  not  his  plea  for  se- 
lectiveness  and  "  good  taste,"  but  his  plea  for  sympathy 
and  enthusiasm.  His  saying  that  the  time  had  come 
"  to  substitute  for  the  petty  criticism  of  faults  the  great 
and  fruitful  criticism  of  beauties," 1  a  saying  that  only 
echoed  Madame  de  Stael,  was  taken  up  by  Hugo  and 
became  a  favorite  formula  for  that  critique  admirative 
so  dear  to  the  romanticist,  the  criticism  that  is  aesthetic 
rather  than  judicial.  Chateaubriand's  own  applica- 
tion of  the  aesthetic  point  of  view  in  the  "  Genie  du 
Christianisme "  is  above  all  a  reaction  from  the 
eighteenth  century ;  or  it  would  be  better  to  say  a  con- 
tinuation of  the  quarrel  of  the  eighteenth  century  of 
Rousseau  with  the  eighteenth  century  of  the philosophes 
and  Voltaire.  Rousseau  himself  may  perhaps  be  most 
adequately  defined  as  the  great  aesthete  (using  the  word 
in  its  broadest  sense,  in  its  derivation  from  the  Greek 
word  feeling).  The  Savoyard  Vicar  proves  God  to  his 
pupil  by  showing  him  the  glories  of  the  sunrise  over  the 
valley  of  the  Po.  The  transition  from  this  aesthetic 
deism  to  aesthetic  Catholicism  is  evidently  easy.  In 
Chateaubriand  the  rays  of  the  rising  sun,  in  addition  to 
falling  upon  a  glorious  landscape,  also  fall  upon  the 
consecrated  wafer  which  Father  Aubry  was  at  that  mo- 
ment lifting  in  the  air ;  whereupon  the  narrator  exclaims, 

1  This  is  the  form,  in  which  the  saying  appears  in  the  Preface  de  Crom- 
well. Chateaubriand's  wording  is  slightly  different.  See  his  article  on  the 
Annales  litteraires  of  Dussault,  Feb.,  1819. 


68  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

"  0  charm  of  religion  !  0  magnificence  of  the  Christian 
cult ! "  The  right  title  for  the  "  Genie  du  Christianisme," 
as  has  been  pointed  out,  would  be  the  Beauties  of  Christ- 
ianity. Chateaubriand  would  view  everything  aesthetic- 
ally—  even  hell.  Dante  and  Milton  have  shown  that  we 
might "  possess  hells  as  poetical  as  those  of  Homer  and 
Virgil."  * 

Chateaubriand  boasted  that  by  this  work  he  had  de- 
finitively discredited  the  eighteenth  century.  "  Why,"  he 
asks,  "  is  this  century  so  inferior  to  the  seventeenth  ? 
For  it  is  no  longer  time  to  dissimulate  the  fact;  the 
writers  of  our  age  have  in  general  been  placed  too  high." 
(Sainte-Beuve  was  later  to  take  this  sentence  as  motto  for 
his  own  book  on  Chateaubriand.)  "  If  there  is  so  much 
that  is  blameworthy  in  the  works  of  Rousseau  and  Vol- 
taire, what  is  to  be  said  of  the  works  of  Raynal  and  Dide- 
rot?"2 Chateaubriand's  explanation  of  this  inferiority 
is,  of  course,  that  the  eighteenth  century  was  irreligious, 
and  irreligious  because  it  was  unimaginative,  and  unim- 
aginative because  it  was  over-analytical.  "  Cast  your  eyes 
on  the  generations  that  followed  the  age  of  Louis  XIV. 
Where  are  those  men  with  calm  and  majestic  faces,  with 
noble  garb  and  bearing,  with  chastened  speech  .  .  .  ? 
You  look  for  them  and  no  longer  find  them.  Little  obscure 
men  move  about  like  pigmies  under  the  lofty  porticos  of  the 
monuments  of  another  age.  On  their  hard  features  are 
stamped  egotism  and  the  contempt  of  God.  They  have  lost 
both  the  nobility  of  garb  and  the  purity  of  speech :  you 

1  G.  du  Christ.,  2*  Partie,  livre  iv,  c.  xm. 
*  G.  du  Christ.,  3e  Partie,  livre  iv,  c.  v. 


CHATEAUBKIAND  69 

would  take  them  not  for  the  sons  but  for  the  buffoons  of 
the  great  race  that  went  before  them.  The  disciples  of 
the  new  school  wither  the  imagination  with  I  know  not 
what  truth,  which  is  not  the  veritable  truth.  .  .  .  Mod- 
ern writers  make  use  of  a  narrow  philosophy  which  di- 
vides and  subdivides  everything,  makes  precise  meas- 
urement of  feelings,  submits  the  soul  to  calculation  and 
reduces  God  and  the  universe  to  a  passing  modifica- 
tion of  nothingness." l  "  The  spirit  of  reasoning  by  de- 
stroying the  imagination  saps  the  foundations  of  the 
fine  arts." 2  The  sciences  always  bring  on  ages  of  irre- 
ligioii,  which  are  followed  in  close  sequence  by  ages  of 
destruction.3 

These  are  themes  the  equivalent  of  which  we  can  find 
developed  in  a  thousand  forms  by  French,  German,  and 
English  romanticists  at  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  Unfortunately,  the  fact  that  a  person  protests 
against  analysis  and  appeals  from  intellect  and  analysis 
to  the  "  imagination  "  or  the  "  heart "  or  the  "  soul,"  or, 
like  Madame  de  Stael  to  "  enthusiasm,"  does  not  tell 
us  all  that  it  might  regarding  his  ultimate  point  of  view. 
Joubert  uttered  a  similar  protest  against  "  the  man 
who  has  become  so  anatomical  that  he  has  ceased  to 
be  a  man  and  sees  in  the  noblest  and  most  touching 
gait  only  a  play  of  muscles,  like  an  organ  manufacturer 
who  should  hear  in  the  most  beautiful  music  only  the 
little  clicks  of  the  key-board."4  But  is  the  "soul"  that 
Joubert  opposes  to  this  analytical  excess  the  "soul" 

1  G.  du  Christ.,  3e  Partie,  livre  IV,  c.  V.       2  Ibid.,  3e  Partie,  livre  I,  c.  vn. 
8  Ibid.,  livre  n,  c.  i,  et  H.  *  Tit.  xxui,  CLXXXVI. 


70  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

opposed  to  it  by  the  romanticist?  That  is  the  crucial 
question.  The  same  ambiguity  clings  to  the  word  "  soul" 
as  to  the  words  "heart"  and  "intuition,"  which  I  dis- 
cussed in  the  last  chapter.  The  "  soul "  of  Chateau- 
briand is  plainly  a  Rousseauistic  and  not,  like  that  of 
Joubert,  a  Platonic  "  soul."  Formulae  of  this  kind  must, 
of  course,  be  applied  with  great  caution  to  the  mysterious 
unity  of  a  living  spirit  —  especially  when  the  spirit  is 
that  of  a  man  of  genius  like  Chateaubriand.  I  for  one 
should  not  deny  him  greatness  of  soul  in  any  sense.  Yet 
he  is  in  the  main  intuitive  of  the  Many  and  not  of  the 
One,  and  what  he  has  to  offer  us  therefore  is  not  wisdom, 
but  aesthetic  perceptiveness. 

Now  aesthetic  perceptiveness  is  in  itself  a  precious 
thing,  but  to  claim  that  because  you  are  aesthetically 
perceptive  you  are  therefore  religious  is  to  fall  into  the 
underlying  romantic  error,  which  may  be  defined  as  try- 
ing to  make  the  things  that  are  below  the  intellect  do 
duty  for  those  that  are  above  it.  "Incredulity,"  says 
Chateaubriand,  "  is  the  principal  cause  of  the  decadence 
of  taste  and  genius."  1  We  recognize  here  the  central 
thesis  of  Ruskin.  It  is  already  a  dangerous  confusion  to 
refer  art  and  religion  to  a  common  source.  A  man  may 
be  truly  religious  without  being  in  the  least  artistic,  and 
conversely  (though  we  should  add  that  art  and  religion 
may  and  usually  do  interact  in  a  thousand  ways).  The 
confusion  becomes  positively  pernicious  when  the  com- 
mon ground  on  which  both  art  and  religion  are  made  to 
rest  is  mere  aestheticism.  Sensible  people  feel  a  peculiar 

1  G.  du  Christ,  3e  Partie,  livre  IV,  c.  v. 


CHATEAUBRIAND  71 

exasperation  when  romantic  aesthetes  like  Rousseau  and 
Ruskin  and  Chateaubriand  set  themselves  up  as  religious 
teachers.  They  feel  instinctively  that  something  is  wrong, 
even  when  unable  to  trace  clearly  the  nature  of  the  error. 
To  lack  true  inwardness  like  Chateaubriand  and  at  the 
same  time  to  become  the  champion  of  religion  is  simply 
to  substitute  a  pose  for  reality.  "  He  never  questions 
himself,"  says  Joubert  in  the  letter  on  Chateaubriand  to 
which  I  have  already  referred, "  unless  it  be  to  find  out 
whether  the  exterior  parts  of  his  soul,  I  mean  his  taste 
and  imagination,  are  content,  whether  his  thought  is 
harmoniously  rounded  and  his  phrases  musical,  whether 
his  images  are  vivid,  etc. ;  caring  little  whether  it  is  all 
intrinsically  good :  that  is  his  smallest  concern."  l  And 
therefore  we  may  say  with  Sainte-Beuve,  that  we  are  not 
in  the  year  1800  at  the  dawn  of  a  great  literary  age,  but 
merely  of  one  of  the  most  brilliant  periods  of  decline. 

Chateaubriand's  slight  regard  for  the  truth  of  Christ- 
ianity as  compared  with  its  aesthetic  charm  is  one  of 
the  commonplaces  of  criticism.  He  has  been  charged 
with  preferring  beauty  to  truth,  but  it  might  be  less 
misleading  to  say  illusion  to  reality,  since  beauty  after 
all  is  more  than  mere  sestheticism.  His  aim,  as  he  tells 
us,  is  less  to  convince  our  intellects  than  to  enchant  our 
imaginations.  To  the  meagreness  of  the  intellectual  as 
compared  with  the  aesthetic  appeal  of  the  "  Genie  du 
Christianisme  "  is  due,  no  doubt,  the  fact  that  it  has  so 
largely  ceased  to  interest.  "  But  one  half -penny  worth  of 
bread,"  we  are  tempted  to  exclaim,  as  so  often  in  roman- 

1  Cor.,  10&-9. 


72  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

tic  writing,  "  to  this  intolerable  deal  of  sack  !  "  He  finds 
a  proof  of  original  sin  in  the  mode  of  locomotion  of  the 
serpent;  the  three  Graces  are  used  as  an  argument  in 
favor  of  the  Trinity ;  the  celibacy  of  priests  is  backed 
up  by  the  virginity  of  bees.  He  points  out  that "  nature 
has  not  been  as  delicate  as  disbelievers  ...  It  has  be- 
stowed the  form  of  the  cross  upon  a  whole  family  of 
flowers."  l  He  proves  the  necessity  of  the  Sabbath  from 
the  fact  that  "  the  ox  cannot  labor  nine  days  in  succes- 
sion. On  the  seventh  day  his  plaintive  bellowings  call 
for  the  repose  ordained  by  the  Creator."  2 

If  we  trace  the  influence  of  Chateaubriand  we  find  at 
the  beginning  aesthetic  and  mediaeval  Christians,  then 
aesthetic  mediaevalists,  and  finally  aesthetes  who  are 
neither  mediaevalists  nor  Christians.  The  essential  ele- 
ment from  the  start  was  the  aestheticism.  Though  he 
failed  to  convert  French  writers  as  a  class  to  Catholicism, 
even  aesthetic  Catholicism,  he  did  lure  them  into  the 
tower  of  ivory.  He  encouraged  them  to  cultivate  their 
sensorium  and  neglect  their  intellect.  The  heart  and 
head  of  the  century  were  thus  put  into  opposition  with 
each  other.  It  is  partly  due  to  Chateaubriand  that  M. 
Faguet  was  enabled  to  write  his  studies  of  modern  French 
writers  in  two  series  —  the  men  of  imagination  in  one 
series  and  the  thinkers  in  another.  It  is  a  singular  piece 
of  good  fortune  for  the  Germans  that  their  chief  modern 
writer  is  not  merely  a  great  imaginative  and  emotional, 
but  also  a  great  intellectual,  force.  The  contrast  is 
striking  in  this  respect  between  Goethe  and  Chateau- 

1  G.  du  Christ.  4e  Partie,  livre  I,  c.  n.  a  Ibid.,  c.  iv. 


CHATEAUBRIAND  73 

briand;  and  still  more  striking  between   Goethe   and 
Hugo. 

Chateaubriand  appears  to  far  better  advantage  when 
he  is  dealing  with  Christianity  not  in  itself,  but  in  its 
relation  to  art  and  literature.  Parts  n  and  in  of  the 
"  Genie  du  Christianisme  "  which  treat  of  this  relation, 
exhibit  the  somewhat  baffling  interplay  I  have  already 
noted  between  classic,  pseudo-classic,  and  romantic  ele- 
ments ;  and  for  this  reason,  no  doubt,  they  have  been 
somewhat  variously  judged,  though  on  the  whole  more 
favorably  than  the  other  parts  of  the  work.  Sainte-Beuve 
seems  especially  conscious  of  the  classic  note.1  He  dis- 
covers in  Chateaubriand  a  native  instinct  for  literary  ex- 
cellence that  has  been  fortified  and  enriched  by  humanis- 
tic memories ;  and  so,  though  making  sharp  reservations 
as  to  the  general  thesis,  he  accords  hearty  praise  to  the 
details.  "  All  that  portion  of  the  work,"  says  Sainte- 
Beuve,  "  in  which  the  author  compares  the  natural  char- 
acters in  antiquity  and  among  the  moderns"  (e.g.  the 
comparison  of  husband  and  wife  in  Milton's  Adam  and 
Eve  with  the  Ulysses  and  Penelope  of  Homer)  .  .  . 
"  abounds  in  delicate  beauties  and  exquisite  shadings :  it 
is  literary  criticism  in  the  grand  manner."  He  goes  on 
to  say  that  "  the  best  substance  of  classic  French  criti- 
cism should  be  sought  in  such  pages."  Scherer,  on  the 
contrary,  though  he  admits  that  Chateaubriand  ren- 
dered at  times  with  a  certain  eloquence  the  impression 
produced  on  him  by  what  he  read,  is  conscious  in 
the  very  comparisons  singled  out  by  Sainte-Beuve  for 

1  Chat,  et  son  groupe  litteraire,  l,  318  ff. 


74  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

special  praise  of  something  set  and  formal  and,  in  a 
word,  pseudo-classic.  They  still  lack  the  modern  keen- 
ness of  characterization.  Chateaubriand  for  his  part, 
•who  was  of  course  the  very  last  person  to  underestimate 
his  own  merits,  observes  in  the  "Memoires  d'Outre- 
Tombe":  "The  paragraphs  in  which  I  deal  with  the 
influence  of  our  religion  in  our  manner  of  seeing  and 
painting  .  .  .  the  chapters  which  I  devote  to  investi- 
gating the  new  feelings  introduced  into  the  dramatic 
characters  of  antiquity,  contain  the  germs  of  the  new 
criticism." 

In  the  comparisons  of  which  he  speaks  Chateaubriand 
is  served  both  by  his  classic  taste  and  his  romantic  in- 
stinct. According  as  his  mood  is  predominantly  roman- 
tic or  classical,  he  can  oppose  to  pagan  antiquity  either 
the  Middle  Ages  or  the  French  seventeenth  century, 
which  was  at  once  classical  and  Christian.  Like  other 
French  reactionaries,  including  Joubert,  he  exalts  Bos- 
suet,  "  who  loves  to  let  fall  from  his  lips  those  great 
words  l  time '  and  l  death '  which  reecho  in  the  silent 
depths  of  eternity."  It  is  but  natural  that  the  author  of 
the  "  Martyrs  "  should  show  a  special  predilection  for  the 
two  chief  representatives  of  the  Christian  epic,  Tasso 
and  Milton.  His  thesis  imposed  upon  him  the  somewhat 
difficult  task  of  proving  that  the  personages  of  Tasso, 
being  at  once  Christian  and  mediaeval,  are  more  poeti- 
cal than  those  of  Homer.  The  combination  in  Milton 
of  the  grand  manner  with  a  Christian  subject  made 
a  special  appeal  to  Chateaubriand.  Furthermore,  we 
should  not  forget  that  he  spent  a  number  of  the  most 


CHATEAUBRIAND  75 

formative  years  of  his  youth  in  England  and  that  the 
English  influence  is  very  visible  in  him.  A  chief  pro- 
duct of  this  influence  was  his  translation  of  Milton  and 
the  somewhat  rambling  and  superficial  study  of  Eng- 
lish literature  which  he  wrote  to  accompany  it.  At  times 
the  intrusion  into  this  study  of  the  note  of  romantic 
egotism  (as,  for  example,  where  he  says :  "  Now  that  in 
our  two  countries  monarchy  is  inclining  towards  its  end, 
Milton  and  I  no  longer  have  any  political  quarrel  with 
each  other  ")  J  anticipates,  though  faintly,  Hugo's  ex- 
traordinary rhapsody  on  Shakespeare. 

We  have  seen  that  Chateaubriand  differed  from 
Scherer  and  Sainte-Beuve  in  emphasizing  especially  the 
element  of  novelty  in  his  own  criticism.  For  example,  he 
shows — "a  thing  that  had  not  been  at  all  understood 
previously — that  with  the  same  names  and  under  some- 
what similar  outer  forms  the  characters  of  Racine  and 
Euripides  express  entirely  different  sentiments.  Phaedra 
in  Racine  is  no  longer  a  pagan  but  an  erring  Christian 
wife,"  etc.  I  believe  that  Chateaubriand  puts  us  on  the 
track  here  of  his  real  influence  as  a  critic.  The  lesson 
the  new  criticism  took  to  heart  was  that  it  should  pene- 
trate beyond  the  mere  form  of  a  work  of  art  to  the  soul. 

But  here  again  it  is  necessary  to  remember  that  the 
word  "  soul "  is  in  itself  ambiguous.  Behind  the  mere 
outer  form  of  a  work  of  art  there  may  be  two  "  souls  " 
(both  only  to  be  apprehended  intuitively),  a  soul  in  vir- 
tue of  which  it  has  a  general  and  representative  value, 
and  a  soul  in  virtue  of  which  it  is  unique.  Both  kinds 

1  Last  paragraph  of  Essai  sur  la  lit.  ang. 


76 

of  soul  appear  vitally  fused  in  the  work  of  art  that  is 
completely  beautiful — one  making  itself  felt  as  sym- 
metry and  repose,  as  inner  form  we  may  say,  the  other  as 
individual  life  and  expression.  Stated  Platonically  the 
complete  work  of  art  suggests  to  us  through  the  medium 
of  the  imagination  the  presence  of  the  One  in  the 
Many.  Now  the  soul  that  Chateaubriand  instinctively 
seizes  upon  and  renders  is  not  the  soul  that  makes 
for  form  and  symmetry,  but  the  soul  that  makes  for 
expression  (though  he  leans  less  one-sidedly  towards 
expression  than,  for  instance,  Ruskin). 

Moreover,  he  not  only  responds  aesthetically  to  the 
present  object  and  renders  it  in  its  uniqueness  but  he 
also  has  the  gift,  closely  associated  in  its  origins  with 
romantic  nostalgia,  of  journeying  imaginatively  in  time 
and  space,  and  then  conveying  vividly  what  is  either 
temporally  or  spatially  remote.  For  example,  he  does 
not  give  us  an  adequate  idea  of  the  Christianity  of  the 
period  he  has  treated  in  his  "Martyrs"  —  that  would 
have  required  more  insight  into  the  permanent  element 
in  human  nature  than  he  possessed.  He  is,  in  fact,  more 
at  home  with  the  paganism  of  the  period,  because  behind 
his  fagade  of  aesthetic  Catholicism,  he  himself  lived 
more  on  the  pagan  than  on  the  Christian  level.  What 
he  does  do  at  his  best  is  to  conjure  up  before  our  inner 
eye  a  vision  of  what  was  peculiar  to  the  period,  of  its 
individual  expression,  of  the  precise  picturesque  details 
by  which  it  differed  from  all  other  periods.  This  art  of 
local  color  evidently  concerns  the  historian  at  least  as 
much  as  the  literary  critic ;  and  Chateaubriand  counts 


CHATEAUBRIAND  77 

among  the  important  initiators  into  the  new  historical 
spirit.  The  whole  shifting  of  emphasis  from  the  perma- 
nent to  the  local  and  transitory  aspects  of  human  nature 
is  so  well  brought  out  in  Augustin  Thierry's  account  of 
Chateaubriand's  influence  upon  him  that  I  must  quote 
from  it  in  spite  of  its  familiarity.  Thierry,  we  should 
remember,  though  he  prepared  the  way  for  Michelet  and 
for  the  French  romantic  school  of  history  in  general, 
showed  for  his  own  part  an  almost  Attic  moderation  in 
his  use  of  the  new  picturesqueness. 

Thierry,  then,  relates  how  in  1810  he  read  "Les 
Martyrs "  in  the  vaulted  class-room  of  the  College  de 
Blois  while  his  fellow-students  were  off  on  a  walk.  He 
was  especially  moved  by  the  narrative  of  Eudore,  "  that 
living  history  of  the  empire  in  its  decline,"  and  con- 
trasted the  style  with  that  of  his  text-book :  "  Clovis, 
son  of  King  Childeric,  mounted  the  throne  in  484  and 
strengthened  by  his  victories  the  foundations  of  the 
French  monarchy,"  etc.  .  .  .  "  Nothing  had  given  me  any 
idea  of  those  terrible  Franks  of  M.  de  Chateaubriand, 
those  Franks  dressed  in  the  spoils  of  bears,  sea-calves, 
buffaloes,  and  wild  boars ;  of  that  entrenched  camp  with 
its  leather  boats  and  its  chariots  drawn  by  great  oxen ; 
of  that  army  drawn  up  in  a  triangle  in  which  you  could 
distinguish,  in  the  midst  of  a  forest  of  lances,  only 
skins  of  wild  beasts  and  half -naked  bodies  .  .  .  The 
impression  produced  on  me  by  the  war-song  of  the 
Franks  had  in  it  something  electrical.  I  left  the  place 
where  I  was  seated  and,  walking  up  and  down  the  room, 
I  repeated  aloud,  making  my  feet  ring  out  on  the  pave- 


78  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

merit : l  Pharamond !  Pharamond !  we  have  fought  with  the 
sword,'  etc.  .  .  .  This  moment  of  enthusiasm  was  perhaps 
decisive  for  my  future  vocation  .  .  .  This  is  my  debt  to 
the  writer  of  genius  who  opens  and  dominates  the  new 
literary  age.  All  those  who  in  different  directions  are 
advancing  along  the  pathways  of  this  age  have  encoun- 
tered him  in  the  same  way  at  the  source  of  their  studies, 
at  their  first  inspiration ;  there  is  no  one  of  them  who 
might  not  fittingly  say  to  him,  as  Dante  said  to  Virgil : 

'  Tu  duca,  tu  signore,  e  tu  maestro.'  " 1 

We  thus  see  history  ceasing  to  be  abstract  and  colorless 
and  becoming  concrete  and  expressive ;  we  see  it  getting 
rid  of  its  old  artificial  unity  and  cultivating  instead  a 
sense  of  the  variable  in  human  nature  —  a  sense  that 
is  not  tempered  by  any  new  and  vital  perception  of  unity. 
Thierry  possibly  overstates  Chateaubriand's  influence 
upon  himself  and  others.  But  it  is  evident  that  although 
Chateaubriand  posed  as  a  champion  of  the  old  order 
and  the  fixed  standards  it  implied,  by  the  actual  force 
of  his  example  he  helped  forward  to  an  important  ex- 
tent the  main  movement  of  the  century  in  both  history 
and  literary  criticism  from  the  absolute  to  the  relative. 
1  Preface  to  Redts  des  temps  merovingiens. 


IV 


THE    TRANSITION    TO    SAINTB-BEUVE 
VILLEMAIN COUSIN NISARD 

FRENCH  criticism  throughout  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  may  be  studied  almost  entirely  in  terms  of 
the  romantic  movement.  There  is  an  extreme  "  right " 
of  strict  traditionalists  opposed  to  an  extreme  "left"  of 
literary  radicals,  a  "  centre  "  and  a  "  left-centre  "  that 
welcome  the  more  moderate  innovations,  etc.  This  crit- 
ical alignment  either  for  or  against  romanticism,  which 
was  more  or  less  obscured  during  the  second  half  of 
the  century,  is  reappearing  in  our  own  days,  except  per- 
haps that  there  are  fewer  intermediary  shades  of  opinion 
between  extreme  "  right "  and  extreme  "  left."  Nowa- 
days those  who  are  conservative  in  literature  are  at  least 
superficially  consistent  in  being  religious  and  political 
conservatives  as  well ;  whereas  in  the  earlier  period  there 
was  a  curious  confusion  in  this  matter  that  I  have  already 
touched  on  in  speaking  of  the  critics  of  the  Empire. 
The  political  radicals  were  often  the  most  "  classical " 
in  literature,  whereas  the  romantic  innovators  were  wont 
to  pose,  in  the  wake  of  Chateaubriand,  as  champions 
of  the  "  throne  and  altar."  It  took  Hugo,  who  began  as 
a  royalist  and  Christian  of  this  type,  several  years  to 
discover  that  romanticism  is  after  all  only  "  liberalism 
in  literature." 


80  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

The  battle  between  the  opposing  literary  factions  was 
carried  on  by  means  of  pamphlets,  prefaces  and  articles 
in  newspapers  and  reviews.  Literary  journalism  has 
never  been  more  flourishing  in  France  than  during  the 
Restoration  and  the  early  days  of  the  July  Monarchy. 
"  La  Muse  Francaise  "  (July,  1823,  to  July,  1824)  was  a 
typical  organ  of  the  romanticists  in  their  early  phase. 
It  was  very  reactionary  politically,  admired  the  "  Mar- 
tyrs," and  opposed,  above  all,  the  criticism  of  beauties, 
to  the  criticism  of  faults.  At  the  opposite  extreme  was 
the  politically  liberal  "  Constitutional."  Romanticist 
in  this  journal  was  synonymous  with  foreigner  and  re- 
actionary, and  at  times  with  lunatic.  "  Romanticism," 
we  read,  "  is  not  a  subject  of  ridicule ;  it  is  a  disease 
like  somnambulism  or  epilepsy."  A  romanticist  is  a  man 
who  is  beginning  to  lose  his  mind:  "  you  must  pity  him, 
talk  reason  to  him,  bring  him  around  gradually ;  you 
can't  make  of  him  the  subject  of  a  comedy,  however, 
but  at  most  of  a  medical  thesis." 1  Beyond  all  doubt 
the  most  distinguished  of  these  literary  journals  was 
the  "  Globe  "  (1824-1831),  on  which  Goethe  bestowed 
his  admiration,  noting  especially  the  articles  of  the 
youthful  Sainte-Beuve  on  Hugo.  The  "  Globe  "  did  as 
much  as  any  journal  of  the  time  to  help  forward 
the  new  cosmopolitanism  we  have  associated  with  Ma- 
dame de  Stael,  and  was  especially  active  in  behalf  of 
Shakespeare. 

To  the  strict  traditionalists  of  this  period  the  purity 

1  Quoted  in  Petit  de  Julleville,  Hist .  de  la  langue  et  de  la  litteraturcfran- 
ise,  vn,  690. 


VILLEMAIN  —  COUSIN  —  NISARD  81 

and  very  integrity  of  the  French  language  seemed  to  be 
menaced  by  a  universal  invasion  of  foreign  influences. 
We  read  in  one  of  the  comic  papers,  as  early  as  1814, 
of  the  articles  of  a  "  romantic  confederation."  England 
and  Germany  are  to  be  represented  in  this  confederation 
by  Madame  de  Stael  and  Benjamin  Constant ;  Prussia, 
Russia,  Austria,  etc.,  by  "  le  sieur  "  Schlegel ;  Italy  and 
Spain  by  Sismondi  and  his  "  Literatures  of  the  South." 
"  The  purpose  of  the  confederation  is  to  introduce  into 
French,  on  the  one  hand,  the  obscurities  of  the  lan- 
guages of  the  North,  and,  on  the  other,  the  conceits 
and  bombast  of  the  south,  and  to  continue  the  process 
until  Frenchmen  no  longer  understand  one  another."  l 
Though  a  vast  machinery  was  organized  at  this  time  for 
opening  up  a  knowledge  of  foreign  literatures,  the  ro- 
mantic movement  appears  far  more  cosmopolitan  than  it 
really  was.  The  hopes  that  the  "  Globe  "  and  its  editors 
inspired  in  Goethe  were  not  fulfilled.  Too  many  of  the 
promising  youths  of  this  period  were  drafted  into  poli- 
tics after  the  July  Revolution.  The  romantic  leaders 
were  as  a  class  rather  innocent  of  foreign  influences  — 
indeed,  of  deep  intellectual  culture  of  any  kind  —  unless 
we  regard  the  influence  of  Rousseau  and  his  French  fol- 
lowers as  a  foreign  intrusion  into  the  pure  French  tra- 
dition. For  even  the  two  foreign  influences  that  seem 
all-powerful  at  this  time,  those  of  Byron  and  Scott,  do 
little  more  than  affect  the  surface  manifestations  of  the 
great  main  movement  which  comes  down  from  Rousseau 

1  Nain  jaune,  20  Dec.,  1814  ;  quoted  in  Maigron,  Le  Roman  historique 
a  fepoque  romantique,  155. 


82  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

and  Chateaubriand.  Byron  helped  forward  the  revolt 
against  all  kinds  of  authority,  including  literary  author- 
ity ;  Scott  cooperated  powerfully  with  Chateaubriand  in 
teaching  the  new  art  of  travelling  imaginatively  in  time 
and  space.  The  fashion  for  local  color  and  historical 
romance  that  was  set  by  Scott  has  importance  only  as 
it  testifies  to  something  deeper,  the  tendency,  namely, 
to  see  life  and  literature  not  absolutely  but  relatively 
and  historically. 

i 

The  advance  towards  a  more  historical  and  cosmo- 
politan point  of  view  at  this  time  was  due,  not  merely  to 
the  diffusion  of  a  knowledge  of  foreign  literatures  and 
to  journals  like  the  "  Globe,"  but  to  the  influence  of 
three  eminent  professors.  Perhaps  the  most  stirring 
events  in  the  politically  dull  days  of  the  Restoration 
were  the  public  lectures  given  by  Villemain,  Cousin,  and 
Guizot.  We  hear  of  two  thousand  eager  auditors  at  the 
courses  of  Cousin  during  the  years  1828  to  1830.  The 
originality  of  Cousin,  Villemain,  and  Guizot  was  to  in- 
fuse something  of  the  new  historical  method  into  the 
domains  respectively  of  philosophy,  literary  criticism, 
and  history  itself.  Like  the  "  Globe  "  with  which  they 
were  more  or  less  affiliated,  and  in  which  the  lectures 
of  Cousin  and  Villemain  were  published,  all  three  lec- 
turers were  "  left-centre "  and  continued  Madame  de 
Stael.  Guizot  carried  into  history  the  idea  of  integral 
and  organic  development;  he  did  not  isolate  political 
history  but  related  it  to  the  other  manifestations  of 
the  life  and  activity  of  a  particular  country  and  time. 


VILLEMAIN  —  COUSIN  —  NISARD  83 

Guizot,  however,  is  very  far  from  being  a  pure  relativ- 
ist. He  was  a  leader  of  the  "  doctrinaires  " ;  the  ad- 
miration for  parliamentary  liberalism  that  had  been 
inspired  in  Madame  de  Stael  by  the  spectacle  of  Eng- 
land tended  to  harden  in  Guizot  and  the  other  doctrin- 
aires into  a  political  creed.  He  was  too  anxious  to  im- 
pose the  discipline  of  this  creed  upon  both  past  and 
present.  In  other  words  he  had  a  philosophy  of  history, 
and  the  danger  of  a  philosophy  of  history  is  always  to 
force  the  infinite  and  living  complexity  of  the  facts  into 
a  somewhat  arbitrary  intellectual  mould. 

Cousin  is  distinctly  inferior  to  Guizot  in  constructive 
power.  The  eclectic  philosophy  or  "  spiritualism  "  that 
he  evolved  is  a  somewhat  indeterminate  compound  of 
religion  and  rationalism,  alike  unsatisfactory  to  the  su- 
pernaturalist  and  the  pure  philosopher  of  nature.  He 
made  of  it  for  many  years,  however,  a  very  effective  in- 
strument of  domination  over  French  higher  education. 
Cousin's  real  originality  consists  in  having  converted 
philosophy  into  the  history  of  philosophy.  He  visited 
Germany,  and  in  his  interpretations  of  German  think- 
ers, especially  Hegel,  to  the  French  public,  he  continued 
the  pioneer  work  of  which  Madame  de  Stael  had  set  the 
example.  He  had,  indeed,  many  of  the  instincts  of  the 
explorer  and  intellectual  adventurer.  This  disposition 
became  even  more  visible  when  later  he  turned  from 
philosophy  to  literature  —  especially  to  the  literature  of 
the  first  part  of  the  seventeenth  century  in  France.  He 
took  possession  of  this  new  field  with  infinite  zest,  and 
established  himself  in  it  as  a  conqueror.  He  showed 


84  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

something  of  the  gift  of  the  actor  in  the  way  he  identi- 
fied himself  imaginatively  with  the  personages  of  the 
period,  especially  with  the  heroines  of  the  Fronde.  His 
very  style  with  its  seventeenth-century  flavor  is  itself, 
in  some  degree,  a  histrionic  impersonation,  and  can 
scarcely  be  said  in  any  case  to  be  the  man.  Cousin 
himself  was  impetuous  and  extreme,  impatient  of  any 
outer  check  and  unwilling  to  impose  any  check  upon 
himself ;  and  in  this  respect  he  was  very  far  from  the 
seventeenth  century.  By  the  gusto  with  which  he  dwelt 
on  the  charms  of  some  of  his  heroines  he  exposed  him- 
self to  various  pleasantries.  "He  set  out,"  said  Sainte- 
Beuve,  "to  found  a  great  system  of  philosophy  —  and 
fell  in  love  with  Madame  de  Longueville."  x  He  not 
only  showed  a  lover's  partisanship,  an  unwillingness  to 
admit  any  blemishes  in  the  beloved  object,  but  also  a 
lover's  jealousy.  Sainte-Beuve  relates  how  rudely  he 
was  "elbowed"  by  Cousin  when  he  ventured  to  intrude 
on  his  preserve.  Later  Cousin's  jealousy  diminished, 
because,  as  he  explained,  "I  love  elsewhere." 

The  tendency  to  entrench  one's  self  in  a  single  field 
and  then  to  allow  one's  comprehension  of  this  field  and 
sympathy  for  it  to  override  one's  judgment  and  sense 
of  proportion  are  traits  that  we  associate  with  the  mod- 
ern specialist.  In  fact  we  find  in  Cousin  just  that  mixture 
of  enthusiasm  and  insistence  on  the  new  and  undiscov- 
ered fact,  of  romance  and  science  in  short,  with  which  we 
are  so  familiar  in  our  philological  investigators.  From 
this  point  of  view  Cousin's  discovery  of  the  original 

1  Lundis,  vi,  166. 


VILLEMAIN  —  COUSIN  —  NIS  ARD  85 

text  of  the  "  Pensees  "  of  Pascal,  and  the  presentation 
of  his  discovery  to  the  Academy  in  1843,  mark  an  epoch. 
The  discovery  in  itself  was  very  much  worth  while,  but 
the  direction  it  gave  to  French  scholarship  and  criticism 
inspired  some  disquietude  in  the  humanistic  observer. 
Critics  sought  in  the  wake  of  Cousin  to  shine  not  so 
much  by  their  judgment  and  ideas  and  taste  as  by  pro- 
ducing some  unpublished  fact  or  document  from  the 
archives  of  the  seventeenth  century  or  elsewhere.  The 
Conrart  papers,  Sainte-Beuve  complained,  had  become 
a  mine  of  glory,  and  he  added  that  Conrart's  handwrit- 
ing was  extremely  legible.  Cousin,  in  short,  did  as  much 
as  any  man  of  his  time  to  inaugurate  in  France  what  has 
been  termed  the  age  of  frenzied  research,  thaifureur  de 
I'inedit  which  Brunetiere  was  to  attack  later,  and  which 
after  all  has  been  less  disastrous  to  literary  standards  in 
France  than  in  several  other  countries. 

ii 

Villemain  was  without  the  faults  and  also  to  some 
degree  without  the  virtues  of  the  original  investigator. 
His  instinct  was  not  so  much  to  consider  things  in  them- 
selves as  with  a  view  to  their  oratorical  effect.  There 
are  too  many  suggestions  in  his  style  of  the  flowers  of 
the  ancient  rhetoric.  He  has  even  been  accused  of  think- 
ing first  of  a  fine  phrase  and  then  of  what  he  was  going 
to  put  into  it.  He  was  less  paradoxical  than  Cousin 
and  had  a  surer  taste  in  the  traditional  sense.  His  great 
merit  indeed  is  to  combine  taste,  as  the  word  would 
have  been  understood  by  Voltaire  and  La  Harpe,  with 


86  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

the  sense  of  historical  relativity.  Villemain's  most  effect- 
ive lectures  are  those  on  the  literature  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  and  are  an  application  to  this  period  of  the 
new  cosmopolitan  spirit.  He  undertakes  to  show  the 
interrelationship  during  this  period  of  French,  English, 
and  Italian  civilizations,  their  "  cross-fire  upon  one  an- 
other," to  use  his  own  phrase,  and  at  the  same  time  the 
way  eighteenth-century  life  thus  studied  in  its  totality 
finds  its  counterpart  in  certain  literary  forms.  "  What 
should  have  concerned  Voltaire,"  he  says,  apropos  of 
the  "Henriade,"  "are  not  the  rules  imposed  upon  the 
epic,  but  the  social  conditions  that  allow  it  to  arise." 1 
Since  literature  is  even  more  the  outcome  of  social  con- 
ditions than  of  individual  choice,  the  edge  is  taken  off 
one's  censure.  "Lesage,"  he  says,  "has  been  sharply 
criticised  for  having  a  prosaic  habit  of  mind.  What  we 
see  especially  in  this  habit  of  mind  is  the  mark  of  those 
last  years  of  Louis  XIV  which  melt  together  so  perfectly 
with  the  first  years  of  the  Regency." 2  Villemain  also 
relates  the  work  to  the  author,  as  when  he  sees  in  the 
adventures  of  "Manon  Lescaut"  a  reflection  of  the  in- 
cidents of  Prevost's  own  life. 

The  relationship  established  by  Villemain  between  the 
work  and  the  author,  or  between  the  work  and  the  age, 
is,  as  compared  with  that  of  later  adepts  in  the  histor- 
ical method,  somewhat  lax.  The  historical  and  critical 
elements  seem  at  times  to  lie  side  by  side  and  not,  as  in 
Sainte-Beuve,  to  interpenetrate. 

1  Lit.  au  xvnr  riecle,  i,  164.  *  Ibid.,  i,  251. 


VILLEMAIN  —  COUSIN  —  NISARD  87 

in 

Villemain,  Guizot,  and  Cousin  all  three  combine  in- 
novation with  strongly  conservative  and  traditional  ele- 
ments ;  they  are,  as  I  have  already  said,  "  left-centre." 
The  most  distinguished  representative  of  the  extreme 
"right,"  that  is,  of  literary  conservatism  during  this 
period,  is  undoubtedly  Desire  Nisard.  The  role  played 
by  Nisard  in  the  first  half  of  the  century  is  somewhat 
similar  to  that  played  by  Brunetiere  in  our  own  day. 
The  difference  in  the  two  men  appears  in  Brunetiere's 
complaint  that  he  finds  in  Nisard  "  so  little  history,  I 
mean  so  few  dates,  so  few  facts,  so  little  biography."  1  In 
short,  Nisard  has  less  historic  sense  than  Brunetiere,  less 
logical  vigor,  less  science  (and  also  less  pseudo-science) ; 
he  has,  however,  more  native  fineness  of  taste. 

Nisard's  reactionary  spirit  appears  in  the  first  place 
in  the  fact  that  he  is  neither  a  nationalist  nor  a  cosmo- 
politan in  Madame  de  StaeTs  sense.  He  protests  against 
the  "  chimera  of  a  purely  national  literature." 2  On  the 
other  hand,  he  says  that  "  no  nation  can  imitate  foreign 
literatures  successfully.  In  France,  this  imitation  is 
deadly  to  the  writer."  3  What  is  precious  in  literature 
must  be  not  purely  national,  but  universal  and  human ; 
you  are  to  escape  however  from  national  limitations,  not 
by  mere  comprehension  and  sympathy,  but  by  a  definite 
discipline  in  the  great  humanistic  and  religious  tradi- 
tions, in  what  Nisard  calls  the  twofold  antiquity,  class- 
ical and  Christian.  He  looked  on  the  new  cosmopoli- 
tanism of  comprehension  and  sympathy  as  a  menace  to 

1  L'Evdution  de  la  critique,  212.        '  Histoire,  I,  239.      s  Ibid .,  358. 


88  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

some  of  the  finest  qualities  in  French  literature.  Accord- 
ing to  Goethe,  as  we  have  seen,  Madame  de  Stael  broke 
down  the  Chinese  wall  that  separated  Germany  from 
France.  Nisard  would  have  been  in  favor  of  raising  this 
wall  again.  The  primary  need  is  not  knowledge  but  dis- 
cipline. Now,  to  get  discipline  we  must  have  a  strong 
central  authority  and  look  with  suspicion  on  all  depart- 
ures from  the  norm.  The  authority  that  Nisard  sets  up 
is  a  certain  conception  of  the  French  spirit,  which  in  its 
higher  manifestations  coincides,  he  would  have  us  be- 
lieve, with  the  human  spirit  itself.  Departures  from  the 
French  spirit  or  human  spirit  thus  conceived  are  granted 
only  grudgingly.  Nisard  is  as  unflinching  as  Brune- 
tiere  in  sacrificing  the  sens  propre  or  individual  sense 
to  the  sens  commun  or  general  sense.  Other  countries 
are  "  more  favorable  to  liberty,  which  is  full  of  perils 
and  aberrations,  than  to  discipline.  .  .  .  On  the  contrary, 
the  French  spirit  is  more  inclined  to  discipline  than  to 
liberty.  .  .  .  The  man  of  genius  in  France  is  he  who  says 
what  everybody  knows."  l  Nisard  will  not  allow  that  the 
general  sense  as  expressed  in  tradition  could  have  erred. 
He  is  at  the  opposite  pole  from  those  modern  scholars 
who  are  forever  reversing  the  verdicts  of  the  past,  white- 
washing what  is  traditionally  black,  and  blackwashing 
what  is  traditionally  white.  In  the  case  of  Ronsard,  for 
example, he  says:  "Boileau  has  spoken.  All  that  is  left 
is  to  give  reasons  in  support  of  this  judgment."2  It 
goes  without  saying  that  the  French  spirit  came  to  its 
perfect  maturity,  that  is,  coincided  most  fully  with  the 

1  Histoire,  1, 14.  a  Histoire,  I,  362. 


VILLEMAIN  —  COUSIN  —  NISARD  89 

human  spirit,  in  the  age  of  Louis  XIV.  Nisard  adopts 
indeed  in  a  somewhat  extreme  form  the  theory  of  the 
"classic  age,"  before  or  after  which  everything  errs, 
either  by  deficiency  or  excess.  The  French  spirit  it- 
self can  hardly  be  said  to  have  come  into  existence  at 
any  particular  time.  It  seems  to  exist  out  of  time  and 
space,  in  some  scholastic  heaven  of  its  own,  and  from 
this  altitude  to  smile  down  on  any  individual  who  has 
caught  some  of  its  lineaments.  As  Nisard  says,  the 
French  spirit  "  recognized  itself "  in  this  individual. 
Now  the  French  spirit  could  not  recognize  itself  in  the 
men  of  the  Middle  Ages  who  were  still  infantile,  and 
so  Nisard,  like  Brunetiere,  was  disdainful  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  He  finds,  indeed,  only  intermittent  gleams  of  the 
French  spirit  until  he  gets  almost  to  the  threshold  of 
the  seventeenth  century.  Having  reached  the  seven- 
teenth century  he  heaves  a  sigh  of  relief,  and  instals 
himself  in  it  as  in  the  centre  of  his  subject.  Of  the  four 
volumes  of  his  "  History  "  two  are  devoted  to  this  period. 
In  the  seventeenth  century  itself  he  is  partial  to  what  is 
most  authoritative  and  disciplinary.  Light  is  thrown 
on  his  predilections  by  the  actual  number  of  pages  he 
devotes  to  different  authors.  Montaigne  receives  thirty- 
two  pages,  Moliere  forty-four,  La  Fontaine  thirty-seven : 
on  the  other  hand,  one  hundred  and  twenty  pages  are 
devoted  to  Boileau,  one  hundred  and  thirty  to  Bossuet, 
and  one  hundred  to  Louis  XIV  himself! 

In  thus  making  everything  in  French  literature  con- 
verge on  a  single  point  or  centre,  Nisard  is  led  to  estab- 
lish a  sort  of  literary  profit  and  loss  account.  All  those 


90  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

works  in  which  the  French  spirit  recognizes  itself  are 
set  down  among  the  gains  ;  those  works,  on  the  other 
hand,  in  which  the  pure  lineaments  of  the  French  spirit 
are  obscured  and  which  prepare  the  descent  from  the 
luminous  summits  of  the  seventeenth  century  are  reck- 
oned among  the  pertes.  "If  it  be  true,"  he  says, 
"  that  the  perfection  of  the  French  spirit  in  the  seven- 
teenth century  consisted  in  the  inner  union  of  the  two 
antiquities,  pagan  and  Christian,  the  day  when  this 
union  is  broken  will  see  a  decline  in  the  French  spirit, 
and  the  day  of  perfect  works  will  have  passed.  What ! 
decadence  already  ?  Let  us  avoid  the  word  if  you  wish, 
but  do  not  let  us  be  blinded  to  the  facts  .  .  .  Let  us 
call  by  some  other  name  the  change  that  took  place  in 
French  literature  in  the  eighteenth  century,  provided  it 
be  not  by  the  name  of  progress,  provided  the  gains  do 
not  blind  us  to  the  losses."  * 

Nisard  anticipates  later  reactionaries  in  his  attack  on 
Rousseau  as  the/ons  et  origo  malorum,  as  the  man 
who  did  more  than  any  one  else  to  corrupt  the  integrity 
of  the  French  spirit  and  prepare  the  triumph  of  the  in- 
dividual sense  over  the  general  sense  as  embodied  in 
tradition.  Rousseau  carried  the  love  of  singularity  so 
far,  he  says,  that  "  he  looked  with  more  complacency  on 
the  evil  that  was  his  own  than  on  the  good  he  possessed 
in  common  with  other  people."2  Yet  this  innovator 
who  proceeds  on  the  principle  that  everybody  was  wrong 
before  him  never  writes  better  than  when  he  agrees  un- 
wittingly with  everybody  and  comes  down  from  his  proud 
1  Histoire,  TV,  1.  a  Histoire,  TV,  454. 


VILLEMAIN  —  COUSIN  —  NISARD  91 

reveries  to  the  speech  of  experience  and  ordinary  prac- 
tice. Nisard  treats  Rousseau  as  the  type  of  the  utopist, 
the  man  who  is  more  interested  in  reforming  the  world 
than  in  reforming  himself.  Now  inasmuch  as  people  of 
this  kind  were  never  more  numerous  than  they  are  to-day, 
Nisard's  psychological  analysis  of  the  utopist  has  by  no 
means  lost  its  piquancy.  Apropos  of  the  "  Confessions," 
he  says  that  Rousseau  already  sets  here  the  example  for 
later  writers  "  who  have  made  of  their  pride  one  of  those 
Carthaginian  idols  to  which  they  immolate  everybody 
who  is  guilty  of  being  born  into  the  world  at  the  same 
time  as  themselves."  1  He  is,  no  doubt,  here  glancing  at 
Hugo. 

For  Nisard's  attitude  towards  the  later  romanticists  we 
need  to  turn  from  the  "History  "  to  his  miscellaneous 
essays,  especially  to  those  which  he  collected  in  his  volume 
on  the  romantic  school.  For  two  or  three  years  before 
the  July  Revolution  he  had  himself  had,  as  he  tells  us,  a 
period  of  romantic  aberration,  during  which  he  con- 
tributed laudatory  articles  on  Hugo  to  the  "  Journal  des 
Debats."  "  But  classic  good  sense  returned  to  me,"  he 
adds,  "  at  the  moment  when  I  had  corrupted  my  style 
sufficiently  by  affectation  and  subtlety  to  be  encouraged 
and  even  enjoyed  by  several  German  writers."  2  He  cele- 
brated his  return  to  classic  good  sense  by  publishing  his 
"Manifesto  contre  la  litterature  facile,"  directed  espe- 
cially against  the  inferior  forms  of  romanticism.  A  lively 
exchange  of  hostilities  followed  between  him  and  Jules 
Janin  in  the  "  Revue  de  Paris."  There  is  a  strong  po- 

1  Histoire,  iv,  457.  *  Essais  sur  VEcole  rom.,  166. 


92  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

lemical  intention,  again,  in  his  "  Latin  Poets  of  the  De- 
cadence." The  value  of  what  might  have  been  a  bril- 
liant study  of  silver  Latinity  is  impaired  by  the  obvious 
desire  to  develop  a  parallel  between  the  poets  of  deca- 
dent Rome  and  the  poets  of  his  own  time.  In  the  article 
"Victor  Hugo  en  1836,"  he  proclaims  that  Hugo  is 
lacking  in  "  reason,  taste,  and  critical  sense,"  and  that 
his  "  literary  death  is  imminent  and  inevitable."  He  in- 
sinuates that  his  prose  is  better  than  his  verse.  Hugo  is 
the  type  of  the  genius  that  does  not  mature.  He  has 
abundance  without  progress,  and  "in  a  body  that  is  be- 
coming stout  an  intellect  that  is  growing  lean."  1  Hugo's 
wrath  at  this  article  overflowed  at  intervals  for  the 
rest  of  his  life.  Thirty  years  later  he  wrote,  "  An  ass 
that  resembles  M.  Nisard  is  braying." 

By  his  attacks  on  the  imaginative  unrestraint  of  Hugo 
and  others  Nisard  laid  himself  open  to  the  suspicion  of 
being  himself  restrained  in  this  respect  because  he  did 
not  have  a  great  deal  to  restrain.  His  ideal  norm  reflects 
at  times  too  clearly  the  limitations  of  his  own  tempera- 
ment. The  human  spirit  is  not  only  identified  with  the 
French  spirit  but  the  French  spirit  often  seems  a  pro- 
jection of  the  spirit  of  Nisard.  He  is  too  ready  to  force 
the  complex  realities  of  French  literature  into  the  Pro- 
crustean bed  of  his  logical  definition,  even  at  the  risk 
of  mutilation.  The  classic  spirit  thus  conceived  has 
about  it  something  scholastic  —  something  that  justi- 
fies too  much  Taine's  absurd  identification  of  it  with  the 
spirit  of  abstract  reasoning.  The  way  in  which  Nisard 

1  Esxais  sur  VEcolc  row.,  280. 


VILLEMAIN  —  COUSIN  —  NISARD  93 

relates  the  abstract  reasoning  of  Descartes  to  the  classic 
spirit  also  encourages  the  same  error.1  Sainte-Beuve  is 
really  nearer  classical  good  sense  when  he  protests, 
"  Critic,  why  have  but  a  single  pattern  ?  " 2  when  he 
opposes  to  the  somewhat  solemn  image  of  the  French 
spirit  which  Nisard  sets  up,  Voltaire's  saying  that  "  we 
French  are  the  whipped  cream  of  Europe,"  3  and  sees  in 
Voltaire  himself  a  Frenchman  at  least  as  representative 
as  Bossuet. 

Nisard  can  scarcely  be  said  to  have  solved  the  dif- 
ficult problem  of  being  selective  without  being  narrow 
and  exclusive,  of  achieving  a  concentration  that  shall 
not  at  the  same  time  seem  a  contraction.  This  problem 
is  especially  difficult  in  an  age  of  great  expansion  like 
that  in  which  he  lived.  It  is  hard  to  deny  one's  own 
time  without  appearing  unduly  negative,  without  ap- 
pearing to  be  actuated,  like  so  many  French  reaction- 
aries, less  by  love  of  the  past  than  by  hatred  of  the 
present.  "  Criticism,"  says  Nisard,  "  is  the  general  and 
dominating  faculty  of  the  nineteenth  century ;  ...  it  is 
the  soul  of  all  works ;  it  is  mingled  with  all  the  genres"  4 
But  the  criticism  that  dominates  the  nineteenth  century 
is  in  many  respects  the  exact  opposite  of  what  Nisard 
understood  by  the  term,  —  it  is  primarily  comprehensive 
and  sympathetic  and  historical,  and  not,  like  Nisard's 
own  criticism,  primarily  judicial.  At  a  time  when  every- 
body was  exalting  the  principle  of  sympathy,  when  Hugo 

1  Cf.,  however,  what  he  says  of  Boileau:  "La  raison  dans  Boileau  n'est 
pas  la  raison  d'un  ge*ometre,"  etc.  (Histoire,  n,  297). 
8  Lundit,  xv,  211.  »  Ibid.,  xi,  465.  «  Histoire,  iv,  541. 


94  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

affirmed  that  the  only  proper  attitude  to  assume  towards 
genius  is  "  to  admire  like  a  brute,"  Nisard  insisted  that 
an  author's  enemies  are  more  likely  to  be  right  about 
him  than  his  admirers;  that  the  worst  condition  for 
coming  to  a  correct  opinion  about  anything  is  to  look 
on  it  with  the  "  superstitious  eye  of  love." *  Nisard  thus 
succeeds  at  times  like  Brunetiere  in  seasoning  his  con- 
servatism with  paradox,  in  so  defending  the  traditional 
general  sense  as  to  affront  the  general  sense  of  his  con- 
temporaries. 

The  native  fineness  of  Nisard's  taste  and  judgment 
lends  a  positive  value  to  many  pages  of  his  work  quite 
apart  from  his  system;  and  then,  too,  the  work  has  in 
a  high  degree  the  virtues  of  its  defects.  Faulty  though 
the  system  be,  its  consistent  application  gives  to  the 
"  History,"  as  a  whole,  something  four-square  and  mon- 
umental. Sainte-Beuve  cannot  refrain  from  contrasting 
rather  sadly  from  this  point  of  view  Nisard' s  perform- 
ance with  that  of  a  contemporary  with  whom  he  was 
far  more  in  sympathy,  —  J.  J.  Ampere,  son  of  the  nat- 
uralist. Ampere  was  highly  accomplished  in  all  the  new 
historical  and  cosmopolitan  virtues.  His  intellectual  hos- 
pitality was  all-embracing.  He  loved  to  pass  rapidly 
from  one  country  and  language  to  another  so  as  to 
enjoy  sudden  antitheses  of  thought  and  feeling,  intel- 
lectual Turkish  baths,  as  Sainte-Beuve  puts  it.  He  had 
more  than  obeyed  the  injunction  of  Madame  de  Stael 
(ilfaut  avoir  I' esprit  europeen)  and  extended  his  ho- 
rizons even  beyond  Europe.  Sainte-Beuve  mentions  as 
1  See  Histoire,  i,  370  and  n,  26,  etc. 


VILLEMAIN  —  COUSIN  —  NISARD  95 

an  example  of  the  "  lofty  dilettanteisms  of  the  spirit "  in 
which  he  indulged,  that  on  one  occasion  he  read  a  Chin- 
ese book  amidst  the  ruins  of  Ephesus.1  The  history  of 
French  literature  Ampere  was  planning  would  have  had 
all  kinds  of  advantages  over  that  of  Nisard,  but  it  re- 
mained inferior  in  one  important  respect  —  it  was  never 
written.  He  never  succeeded  in  coordinating  his  super- 
abundant material,  in  imposing  a  synthesis  upon  it.  He 
was  deficient  in  that  power  of  pulling  himself  together 
by  which,  according  to  Goethe,  the  master  is  first  re- 
vealed, and  which  at  all  events  is  necessary  if  one  is 
to  get  beyond  "  lofty  dilettanteisms  of  the  spirit,"  and 
achieve  a  monument. 

One  is  tempted  at  times  to  ask  whether  modern 
criticism  has  not  lost  about  as  much  on  one  side  as  it 
has  gained  on  the  other,  whether  its  broadening  out  of 
knowledge  and  sympathy  has  not  been  offset  by  a  de- 
cline in  judgment.  Modern  critics,  Sainte-Beuve  com- 
plains, will  talk  marvellously  about  and  around  a  subject 
but  will  not  commit  themselves  to  the  point  of  saying, 
this  is  good ;  this  is  bad.2  Villemain,  for  instance,  lacked 
courage  in  backing  up  his  instinctive  good  taste.  He 
was  too  capable  of  dodging  and  evasion.  For  his  con- 
temporaries, especially,  he  was  all  flattery  and  compli- 
ance, dominated  and  fascinated  by  powerful  natures 
like  Hugo.3  Cousin  remarked  to  Sainte-Beuve  that  there 
was  in  Villemain  a  perpetual  struggle  between  Interest 
and  Vanity.  "  Yes,"  retorted  Sainte-Beuve,  "  and  it  is 
usually  Fear  that  tips  the  balance." 4  Of  Cousin  him- 

1  N.  Lundis,  xnr,  241.  a  Lundis,  I,  382. 

1  Lundis,  vm,  491.  4  Ibid.,  xi,  191. 


96  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

self  Sainte-Beuve  says  he  was  a  great  and  eloquent 
spirit  and  a  mediocre  character.1  Mediocrity  of  charac- 
ter has  been  known  to  coexist  with  high  intellectual 
gifts  before  the  nineteenth  century.  Yet  Sainte-Beuve 
is  right  in  insisting  on  that  antinomy  between  an  indef- 
inite widening  out  of  one's  horizons  and  staunch  con- 
victions, which  had  already  dawned  on  Madame  de  Stael. 
All  the  modern  enrichments  of  criticism,  Sainte-Beuve 
complains,  do  not  take  the  place  of  the  authority  and 
sterling  good  sense  of  a  Johnson.2  We  cannot  help 
reflecting  that  Sainte-Beuve  himself  was  not  very  John- 
sonian in  his  power  of  imposing  his  authority.  When 
accused  of  being  too  compliant  towards  Chateaubriand 
in  his  lifetime,  he  replied  that  he  felt  in  writing  about 
him  at  that  time  like  the  "  cricket  forced  to  chirp  in  the 
lion's  maw."  3  Dr.  Johnson  in  his  dealings  with  authors 
had  a  way  of  making  them  feel  that  they  and  not  he 
were  in  the  lion's  maw. 

The  whole  problem,  however,  of  the  relationship  be- 
tween comprehension  and  sympathy,  on  the  one  hand, 
and  judgment,  on  the  other,  is  one  that  we  can  best 
study  in  Sainte-Beuve's  own  work.  We  have  gained  in 
this  chapter  some  knowledge  of  the  environment  in 
which  he  spent  his  formative  years.  He  was  one  of  the 
most  assiduous  contributors  to  the  "Globe,"  and  fol- 
lowed the  lectures  of  Guizot,  Cousin,  and  Villemain. 

1  Lundis,  xi,  472.         a  Lundis,  xi,  490.         8  Chateaubriand,  1, 18. 


SAINTE-BEUVE   (BEFORE  1848) 

SAINTE-BETJVE'S  work  is  almost  unique  in  the  way  it 
combines  extent  with  richness  and  variety.  Perhaps  no 
other  writer  has  written  more  than  fifty  volumes  and  re- 
peated himself  so  little,  or  fallen  so  rarely,  even  towards 
the  end,  below  his  own  best  standard.  Voltaire's  vol- 
umes are  still  more  numerous,  but  are  filled  with  repeti- 
tion, and  often  senile  repetition  at  that.  One  way  in  which 
Sainte-Beuve  avoided  repeating  himself  was  by  renewing 
himself.  He  distinguishes  no  less  than  ten  "  literary  cam- 
paigns and  expeditions  "  in  which  he  had  engaged,  "  all 
of  which,"  he  adds,  "  need  to  be  judged  by  themselves 
and  as  different  wholes."  l  If  we  are  dealing  only  with 
the  more  fundamental  changes  in  point  of  view  we  can 
reduce  these  ten  campaigns  or  periods  of  literary  activity 
to  three,  as  he  himself  has  done  elsewhere :  first,  his 
'prentice  years  on  the  "  Globe  "  and  his  career  as  a  mili- 
tant romanticist  (1824-1831) ; 2  secondly,  the  seventeen 
years  of  his  contributions  to  the  "  Revue  des  Deux 
Mondes"  and  other  periodicals,  a  somewhat  neutral  type 
of  criticism,  more  comprehensive  and  sympathetic  than 
judicial  (1831-1848) ;  thirdly,  the  work  of  his  full  crit- 
ical maturity  beginning  with  the  "Chateaubriand  et 
son  Groupe  litteraire "  and  marked  by  a  simpler  style 

1  Portraits  lit.,  n,  526. 

1  Some  would  extend  his  career  of  militant  romanticism  to  about  1834. 


98  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

and  more  judicial  attitude  (1848-1869).  The  six  vol- 
umes of  "  Port-Royal,"  which  occupied  him  for  more 
than  twenty  years,  were  begun  in  the  second  manner  and 
finished  in  the  third. 

i 

Perhaps  these  different  stages  in  Sainte-Beuve's  critical 
development  may  best  be  studied  in  their  relation  to  cer- 
tain large  movements.  We  can  follow  in  his  work  more 
interestingly  perhaps  than  anywhere  else,  the  interplay 
and  conflict  of  the  main  intellectual  currents  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  Those,  indeed,  who  have  written 
about  Sainte-Beuve  have  often  inclined  to  treat  him  from 
a  point  of  view  narrowly  biographical,  to  seek  to  account 
on  personal  and  often  pettily  personal  grounds  for  his 
critical  opinions.  They  have  taken  very  much  to  heart 
his  own  advice  to  "  eschew  the  academic  bust "  and  to 
look  on  the  seamy  as  well  as  on  the  right  side  of  the  tap- 
estry. In  this  sense  one  may  say  he  has  been  made  the 
victim  of  his  own  method.  But  even  Sainte-Beuve's  af- 
fair with  Hugo's  wife,  which  has  been  such  a  delectable 
morsel  for  the  ultra-biographical  school,  may  be  profit- 
ably subordinated  to  the  larger  question  of  his  whole  re- 
lationship to  the  romantic  movement. 

Adopting,  then,  the  more  intellectual,  and  I  believe 
also  the  more  equitable,  method  of  approach,  we  have  to 
consider  first  of  all  as  reflected  in  the  writings  of  Sainte- 
Beuve  the  great  main  struggle  of  the  nineteenth  century 
— that  between  tradition  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  forces 
that  may  be  summed  up  under  the  name  of  naturalism 
on  the  other.  Now  tradition  is  at  least  twofold.  The 


SAINTE-BEUVE  99 

term  covers  what  Nisard  would  call  la  double  antiquite, 
that  is,  both  religious  or  Christian  tradition  and  that 
classical  or  humanistic  discipline  which  is  often  in 
accord,  but  also,  at  times,  at  war  with  Christianity.  Nat- 
uralism, again,  has  its  intellectual  or  analytical  as  well 
as  its  emotional  aspects.  These  two  main  aspects  of  the 
movement  reduce  themselves  virtually  in  the  nineteenth 
century  to  science  and  Rousseauistic  romanticism.  We 
should  add,  however,  that  Sainte-Beuve  was  familiar, 
not  merely  through  books,  but  by  contact  with  its 
surviving  representatives,  with  the  older  forms  of  the 
naturalistic  revolt  against  tradition  —  that  is,  with  both 
the  sentimentalism  and  rationalism  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  He  was  intimate,  for  example,  with  his  fellow- 
townsman,  Daunou,  who  was  at  once  an  accomplished 
classicist  and  a  thorough-going  ideologist — terms  that 
Taine  confounds  but  that  Sainte-Beuve  is  careful  to  keep 
separate.1  He  found  in  Daunou,  as  he  tells  us,  the  living 
embodiment  of  the  older  French  literary  tradition  and 
at  the  same  time  was  initiated  by  him  into  "  the  most 
advanced  eighteenth  century,"  which  meant  in  practice 
into  a  very  advanced  form  of  philosophic  materialism. 
He  also  came  in  contact  with  Fauriel  in  whom,  as  we 
have  seen,  we  can  trace  the  process  by  which  the  eight- 
eenth-century point  of  view  passes  over  into  that  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  Fauriel's  passion  for  origins 
assumes  in  Sainte-Beuve  the  form  of  interest  in  the 
origins  or  youth  of  the  individual  —  "that  ineffable 
moment,"  as  he  says,  "from  which  everything  dates."  2 

1  See  article  on  Dauuou  in  Portraits  con/.,  rv.          2  N.  Lundis,  nr,  25. 


100  MODEKN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Sainte-Beuve  was  also  initiated  into  the  older  social 
as  well  as  the  older  literary  tradition.  We  think  of  him 
during  the  last  twenty  years  of  his  life  as  somewhat  of 
a  recluse,  but  before  1848  he  frequented  the  best  so- 
ciety of  the  time  —  the  men  and  women  who  were  in  the 
true,  as  well  as  in  the  conventional,  sense  aristocratic. 
The  Comte  d'Haussonville  who  belonged  to  this  society  in- 
sinuates that  Sainte-Beuve  was  himself  no  "gentleman." l 
It  is  of  course  true  that  in  his  origins  and  personal 
appearance  as  well  as  in  many  of  his  instincts  Sainte- 
Beuve  was  intensely  bourgeois.  This  is,  no  doubt,  the 
sense  of  the  legend  that  associates  all  the  great  advent- 
ures of  his  life  with  an  umbrella.  Thus  we  are  told  that 
throughout  his  pistol  duel  in  the  rain  with  M.  Dubois,  he 
insisted  on  holding  up  an  umbrella,  giving  as  his  reason 
that  he  was  resigned  to  being  killed  but  not  to  catching 
cold.  Still  he  acquired  in  the  drawing-room  of  Madame 
Recamier  and  elsewhere  a  feeling  for  the  graces  and 
amenities  of  aristocratic  society,  for  its  urbanity  and  tact 
and  measure,  —  all  the  old-world  charm  that  has  scarcely 
survived  the  rude  contact  with  democracy.  Indeed, 
through  all  of  his  middle  period  Sainte-Beuve  had  too 
much  in  mind  as  his  ideal  audience  the  women  of  these 
very  refined  circles,  with  the  inevitable  result  that  he 
inclined  to  preciosite.  He  admits  that  at  this  time  he 
had  become  somewhat  of  a  mannerist,  or,  in  his  own 
words,  had  got  into  the  habit  of  "  caressing  and  over- 
refining  his  thought."  He  thanks  "  necessity,  that  great 

1  Probably  the  least  gentlemanly  thing  Sainte-Beuve  ever  did  was  to 
publish  privately  the  Livre  d' Amour  in  1843. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  101 

muse  which,  at  supreme  moments,  makes  the  dumb  man 
speak  and  the  stammerer  articulate  plainly,"  for  hav- 
ing forced  him  to  address  a  wider  public,  "  to  speak  to 
everybody  in  the  language  of  all." ] 

To  the  kind  of  knowledge  that  comes  from  living 
contact  with  literary  and  social  tradition,  Sainte-Beuve 
added  the  knowledge  that  may  be  gained  by  study. 
From  his  school-days  he  had  been  an  excellent  Latinist 
and  kept  adding  throughout  his  life  to  his  knowledge 
of  Greek.  Even  during  the  last  crowded  years  he  found 
time  to  take  lessons  from  a  native  Greek,  M.  Pantasides, 
and  to  read  through  with  him  several  times  the  "  Iliad  " 
and  "  Odyssey."  "  Immortal  spirits  of  Rome  and  espe- 
cially of  Greece,"  he  exclaims,  "fortunate  geniuses  who 
have  culled  as  though  in  a  first  harvest  all  the  bloom 
and  simple  grace  and  natural  grandeur  of  man,  you  in 
whom  thought,  wearied  by  modern  civilization  and  our 
complex  life,  once  more  finds  youth  and  strength, 
health  and  freshness,  and  all  the  unsophisticated  treas- 
ures of  manly  maturity  and  heroic  youth,  great  men, 
for  us  like  gods  and  whom  so  few  get  close  to  and  con- 
template, do  not  dirdain  this  study  in  which  I  receive 
you  on  festal  occasions;  doubtless  others  possess  you 
more  fully  and  interpret  you  more  worthily ;  you  are 
better  known  elsewhere,  but  nowhere  are  you  more 
deeply  loved." 2 

n 

Sainte-Beuve's  relation  to  Christian  tradition  and  to 
religion  in  general  is  a  delicate  and  important  matter. 

1  Portraits  lit.,  in,  550.  a  Port,  cont.,  v,  467. 


102  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Here  again  he  had  the  advantage  of  coming  into  con- 
tact with  men  who  were  living  incarnations  of  Christ- 
ianity, in  both  its  Catholic  and  Protestant  forms.  For 
an  initiation  into  the  spirit  of  Protestantism  and  to 
some  extent  of  Jansenism  he  was  under  a  deep  debt  to 
the  writings  and  personality  of  Alexandre  Vinet.  But 
before  discussing  further  Sainte-Beuve's  attitude  towards 
Christianity  or  his  capacity  for  definite  belief  at  all,  we 
may  best  quote  his  own  account  (written  late  in  life)  of 
the  phases  through  which  he  passed  in  his  early  man- 
hood :  "  No  mind  is  more  pliant  than  mine  or  more 
thoroughly  broken  in  to  every  form  of  metamorphosis. 
I  began  frankly  and  crudely  with  the  most  advanced 
eighteenth  century,  with  Tracy,  Daunou,  Lamarck,  and 
physiology:  that  is  my  true  substance.  From  there  I 
passed  through  the  doctrinaire  and  psychological  school 
of  the  '  Globe,'  but  making  my  reservations  and  without 
becoming  a  follower.  Thence  I  passed  over  to  poetical 
romanticism  and  through  the  society  of  Victor  Hugo,  and 
seemed  to  melt  into  it.  I  traversed  afterwards,  or  rather 
skirted,  Saint-Simonism  and  almost  immediately  after- 
ward the  society  of  Lamennais,  still  very  Catholic.  In 
1837  at  Lausanne  I  skirted  Calvinism  and  Methodism, 
and  had  to  try  to  interest  this  community.  In  all  these 
journeyings  of  the  spirit  I  never  abdicated  my  will  and 
judgment  save  for  a  moment  in  the  society  of  Hugo 
and  by  a  sort  of  spell.  I  never  pledged  my  belief,  but 
I  understood  things  and  people  so  perfectly  that  I  raised 
the  greatest  hopes  in  true  believers  who  wished  to  con- 
vert me  and  believed  me  already  one  of  them.  My  curi- 


SAINTE-BEUVE  103 

osity,  my  desire  to  see  everything,  to  look  on  every- 
thing at  close  quarters,  my  extreme  pleasure  at  finding 
the  relative  truth  of  everything,  involved  me  in  this 
series  of  experiments,  which  have  been  for  me  only  a 
long  course  in  moral  physiology." l 

Though  Sainte-Beuve  came  to  feel  at  a  comparatively 
early  period  that  it  was  his  destiny  "  to  be  and  remain 
outside  of  everything,"2  he  was  not,  I  believe,  as  re- 
signed to  this  lack  of  centre  in  his  life  as  one  might 
infer  from  this  passage.  Evidence  on  this  point  may  be 
gathered  from  the  letters  he  wrote  for  many  years  to  the 
Abbe  Eustache  Barbe,  who,  before  entering  the  priest- 
hood, had  been  one  of  his  fellow  students  at  the  Bleriot 
Institute  at  Boulogne.  The  two  youths  had  been  wont  to 
take  long  strolls  together  on  the  seashore  and  their  talk, 
as  Sainte-Beuve  tells  us,  ran  ordinarily  on  the  most  seri- 
ous subjects  and  the  eternal  problems.  The  correspond- 
ence is  continued  in  somewhat  the  same  tone.  "  I  suffer," 
he  writes  to  Barbe,  "  from  the  absence  of  faith ;  of  fixed 
purpose  and  pole ;  I  have  the  sentiment  of  these  things, 
but  I  lack  the  things  themselves."3  Later  he  adds,  "My 
life  is  governed  very  much  by  chance  ;  the  flood  is  driv- 
ing me  on  and  my  ship  has  no  anchor."4  Still  later  he 
tells  Barbe  that  he  escapes  from  eating  his  heart  out 
only  "by  plunging  up  to  his  neck  in  study."  "I  am 
revealing  to  you  the  true  secret  of  my  condition."' 
"Work  which  is  my  great  burden  is  also  my  great  re- 
source,"6 he  writes  in  one  of  his  last  letters  to  Barbe. 

1  Port,  lit.,  in,  545.  2  Letter  to  Leriuinier,  7  April,  1833. 

•  Nouvelle  Cor.,  41  (1836).  4  Nouvelle  Cor.,  93  (1844). 

8  Ibid.,  110  (1846).  «  Ibid.,  182  (1863). 


104  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

His  confession  to  the  Protestant  Vinet  coincides  closely 
with  that  to  the  Catholic  Barbe.  "  I  have  passed  into 
the  state  of  a  pure  critical  intelligence,"  he  writes  to 
him,  "and  look  with  saddened  eye  on  the  death  of  my 
heart."  Later  in  the  same  letter  he  compares  his  intelli- 
gence to  a  "  dead  moon  that  bathes  in  its  cold  rays  the 
cemetery  of  his  heart." l  In  one  of  his  detached  thoughts 
he  likens  his  soul,  in  a  metaphor  that  seems  to  have 
suggested  Arnold's  "Dover  Beach,"  to  a  sandy  waste 
of  shore  from  which  the  sea  of  faith  has  long  since 
withdrawn.2 

So  much  for  serious  Christianity  in  Sainte-Beuve. 
He  lacked  faith  and  a  rule  of  life,  but  he  adds,  we  must 
remember,  that  he  had  the  sentiment  of  these  things. 
In  other  words,  although  he  was  never  really  religious, 
he  did  pass  through  a  spell  of  romantic  religiosity.  "  I 
have  followed  in  my  return  to  religion,"  he  writes  to 
Barbe  in  1830,  "  less  the  pathway  of  theology  or  even 
philosophy  than  that  of  art  and  poetry."  In  so  far 
Sainte-Beuve  is  evidently  a  follower  of  Chateaubriand's. 
He  is  not,  however,  like  Chateaubriand  moved  so  much 
by  the  external  poetry  of  Christianity,  the  aesthetic  and 
imaginative  charm  of  its  rites  and  ceremonies,  as  by  the 
poetry  of  its  inner  life.  He  defines  Chateaubriand  as  an 
epicurean  with  a  Catholic  imagination.  He  might  have 
defined  himself,  at  least  for  a  number  of  years,  as  an 
epicurean  with  a  Jansenist  sensibility.  He  repels  Beran- 
ger's  charge  that  he  inclined  "  too  much  to  religiosity, 
the  mania  of  our  epoch,  and  the  very  opposite,  as  I  be- 

1  Cor.,  i,  130.  «  Port,  lit.,  ra,  540. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  105 

lieve,  of  religion."  *  Yet  in  a  sense  Beranger  was  right ; 
it  was  in  this  mood  that  Sainte-Beuve  composed  the 
earlier  part  of  "Port-Royal  ";  as  the  mood  passed  away, 
he  came  to  regard  the  subject  with  cold  detachment,  as  he 
himself  tells  us,  or,  as  one  of  his  secretaries  maintains, 
with  positive  dislike.2 

Even  more  questionable  forms  of  religiosity  appear  in 
Sainte-Beuve.  He  speaks  of  "  the  six  celestial  months  " 
(the  six  months  of  his  affair  with  Madame  Hugo),  during 
which  he  composed  his  volume  of  religious  verse,  "  Les 
Consolations."  "  My  imagination,"  he  says,  speaking  of  his 
novel "  Volupte,"  which  was  written  about  the  same  time, 
"  has  always  been  in  the  service  of  my  sensibility.  To  write 
a  novel  is  merely  my  way  of  being  in  love  and  saying  so." 
Unfortunately,  he  might  have  made  the  same  remark 
with  equal  truth  of  his  religious  poetry.  It  is  an  inex- 
tricable mixture  of  love  and  religion,  the  religion  being 
so  used  as  to  throw  a  glamour  over  the  earthly  passion. 
This  is  what  I  have  called  elsewhere 3  pseudo-Platonism, 
and  what  in  this  case  might  be  termed  with  equal  pro- 
priety pseudo-Christianity.  The  spell  upon  Sainte-Beuve 
at  this  period,  which  led  him  to  abdicate  his  will  and 
become  an  active  and  militant  romanticist,  was  not 
merely  that  of  Madame  Hugo,  but,  at  the  outset  espe- 
cially, that  of  Hugo  as  well.  Sainte-Beuve  was  not  one 
of  those  stern  and  masculine  natures  that  have  their 
centre  in  themselves.  He  was  not,  if  we  may  borrow  a 
phrase  from  the  journal  of  the  Goncourts,  who  are  in 

1  Port-Royal,  i,  550.  a  Sainte-Beuve,  par  Jules  Levallois,  177. 

8  The  New  Laokoon,  ch.  v. 


106  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

general  among  his  least  intelligent  critics,  a  superior 
male  (un  male  superieur).  He  was  richest  naturally  in 
the  feminine  virtues  of  comprehension  and  sympathy, 
and  instinctively  sought  to  attach  himself  to  some  cause 
or  personality  that  should  give  him  the  sense  of  direc- 
tion which  he  did  not  find  in  himself.  He  was  an  "  Elisha 
always  in  quest  of  his  Elijah."  And  so  he  attached  him- 
self for  a  time  to  Hugo,  just  as  he  was  on  the  point  of 
attaching  himself  a  little  later  to  Lamennais  and  others. 
It  was  a  time  when  many  tempting  baits  were  set  (new 
humanitarian  religions  and  the  like)  for  the  intellectually 
unwary.  But,  though  in  Sainte-Beuve's  own  metaphor  in 
regard  to  these  new  movements,  he  often  nibbled  at  the 
cheese,  he  did  not  get  caught  in  the  trap.  He  did,  how- 
ever, as  I  have  already  said,  carry  on  his  quest  with  more 
real  ardor  and  less  as  a  cold-blooded  experiment  than 
would  appear  from  his  later  accounts.  His  motto  might 
have  been:  "Enthusiasm  and  repentance."  Nor  is  his 
failure  to  fix  himself  to  be  ascribed  entirely  to  his  own 
instability ;  his  successive  disillusions  in  his  search  for  an 
ideal  were  due  in  large  measure  to  the  fact  that  he  was 
living  in  an  age  of  pseudo-idealism,  and  that  he  had 
encountered  so  many  pseudo-idealists.  "If  my  readers 
of  recent  years,"  he  says,  "  have  noticed  in  me  senti- 
ments of  distrust  and  habitual  skepticism,  they  will 
never  know  what  I  have  secretly  had  to  suffer  for  hav- 
ing at  the  outset  carried  all  my  sincerity  and  tender- 
ness of  spirit  into  my  political  and  literary  relations."  * 
What  he  saw  on  every  hand  was  self-seeking  that  dis- 

1  Port.  Cont.,  HI,  49. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  107 

guised  itself  under  rose-colored  clouds  of  fine  senti- 
ments. There  was  Cousin,  the  apostle  of  the  true,  the 
good,  and  the  beautiful,  who  nevertheless  put  no  se^_ 
nous  check  on  his  own  instincts  of  domination;  Ville- 
niairr,  HO  great  a  talent  and  so  accomplished  a  wit, 
always  professing  generous,  liberal,  philanthropic,  Christ- 
ian sentiments,  and  yet  "the  most  sordid  soul,  the 
most  mischievous  ape  alive  " ; l  Hugo,  in  whom  he  had 
found  only  "  the  immense  pride  and  infinite  egoism  of 
an  existence  that  knows  only  itself " ; 2  Balzac,  whom 
he  had  seen  "  exuding  the  intoxication  with  himself  from 
every  pore  "  ;3  Chateaubriand,  who  posed  part  of  the  day 
as  the  author  of  the  "Genius  of  Christianity"  and  then 
devoted  the  rest  of  the  day  to  playing  the  elderly  Don 
Juan.4  No  wonder  he  made  it  an  essential  side  of  his 
method  to  "eschew  the  academic  bust,"  and  to  suspect 
that  under  the  fairest  semblances  and  the  finest  dra- 
peries assumed  by  the  men  of  his  time  there  was  some- 
thing hollow. 

He  had  come  to  feel,  after  having  been  at  least  half 
a  disciple  of  Lamennais,  that  even  this  leader  was  but 
a  pseudo-idealist ;  that  he  was  not  a  man  with  a  rule  of 
life,  but  a  creature  of  impulse.  Lamennais  had  shifted 
abruptly  from  one  extreme  point  of  view  to  another, 
"  leapfrogging,"  as  Sainte-Beuve  puts  it,  over  the  heads 
of  his  moderate  friends.  "  Know,"  he  says  to  Lamennais 
(and  it  is  easy  to  detect  the  plaintive  personal  note), 
"  know  that  nothing  is  worse  than  to  invite  souls  to 

1  Cor.  I,  316.  3  Nouvelle  Cor.,  34. 

1  Port-Royal,  i,  552.  *  Lundis,  n,  158. 


108  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

believe  and  then  to  decamp  without  any  warning  and 
desert  them.  Nothing  so  inclines  them  to  that  skepti- 
cism which  you  still  abhor  although  you  no  longer  have 
anything  definite  to  oppose  to  it.  How  many  souls  that 
were  already  learning  to  hope,  souls  whom  you  had 
got  into  your  hold  and  were  carrying  with  you  in  your 
pilgrim's  wallet,  are,  now  that  the  wallet  has  been  cast 
away,  left  lying  prostrate  at  the  ditch-side."  Of  his 
eminent  contemporaries  in  general,  Sainte-Beuve  said 
he  "knew  most  of  them  too  well  for  his  own  enthu- 
siasm." "  Having  approached  almost  all  of  them  from 
the  point  of  view  of  admiration  and  praise  I  quickly 
went  to  the  bottom  and  know  unluckily  the  whole 
story  of  their  secret  vanity."  *  "  I  thought,"  he  says, 
"  when  I  entered  Hugo's  house  that  I  was  in  the  grot 
of  a  demi-god,  but  I  found  myself  in  the  den  of  the 
Cyclops."  2  His  own  role  in  this  house  had  been,  as  he 
puts  it,  to  "throw  a  gauze  over  epicureanism,"  with 
a  view  to  seducing  a  friend's  wife  ;  in  other  words,  in  a 
pseudo-idealistic  age  he  had  himself  been  a  pseudo- 
idealist. 

The  study  of  the  austere  PortrRoyalists,  he  tells  us, 
had  never  taught  him  to  rise  superior  to  his  own  self- 
love.3  This  self-love  had  been  wounded  cruelly,  espe- 
cially perhaps  by  the  comparative  failure  of  his  creative 
efforts  in  verse,  above  all  of  the  "Pense'es  d'Aout" 
(1837).  And  so  he  gradually  comes  round  to  the  point 
of  view  of  a  writer  who  had  also  suffered  severe  youthful 


i  Nouvelle  Cor.,  42.  3  Sainte-Beuve,  par  L.  S^ch6,  n,  65. 

8  Port-Royal,  VI,  245. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  109 

disillusions  —  La  Rochefoucauld.  Like  him,  he  inclines 
more  and  more  to  see  in  life,  even  in  its  most  specious 
aspects,  a  universal  triumph  of  the  principle  of  self-love. 
After  the  shipwreck  of  the  vessel  freighted  with  his 
romantic  hopes  and  aspirations,  he  resigned  himself  to 
take  refuge  on  the  raft  of  criticism,1  and  perfect  himself, 
like  La  Rochefoucauld,  in  such  wisdom  as  may  lie  in 
disenchantment.  This  break  with  his  past  is  marked 
by  the  publication  of  the  article  on  La  Rochefoucauld 
in  1840,  though  the  fading  away  of  the  romantic 
glamour  had  been  fairly  complete  two  or  three  years 
earlier.  "  This  article  on  La  Rochefoucauld,"  he  writes 
in  the  last  year  of  his  life,  "(if  I  may  be  allowed  to 
call  attention  to  the  fact,)  marks  an  important  moment, 
a  decisive  date  in  my  intellectual  life.  My  early  youth, 
from  the  moment  I  had  begun  to  reflect,  had  been 
entirely  devoted  to  philosophy  and  to  a  positivist  philo- 
sophy in  agreement  with  the  studies  of  physiology  and 
medicine  for  which  I  was  preparing  myself.  But  a  grave 
moral  affection,  a  great  disorder  of  sensibility,  had  inter- 
vened about  1829,  and  had  produced  a  real  deviation  in 
my  ideas.  My  volume  of  verse,  '  Les  Consolations,'  and 
other  works  that  followed,  notably  *  Volupte '  and  the 
first  volumes  of  '  Port-Royal,'  bear  sufficient  witness  to 
this  restless  and  overwrought  mood,  which  carried  with 
it  a  considerable  portion  of  mysticism.  The  study  of 
La  Rochefoucauld  .  .  .  marks  the  end  of  this  crisis  and 
the  return  of  sounder  views,  in  which  years  and  reflec- 
tion have  only  strengthened  me."2  It  is,  indeed,  as  we 

1  Port.  Cont.,  n,  486.  J  Portraits  de  Femmes,  321. 


110  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

shall  see  still  more  clearly  later,  an  essential  part  of 
Sainte-Beuve's  method  to  trace  out  human  self-love  in 
all  its  myriad  disguises.  In  his  last  article  on  La  Roche- 
foucauld (1863),  Sainte-Beuve  speaks  of  the  "subtil- 
ized and  quintessentiated  ego  "  he  often  detects  even  in 
utterances  and  points  of  view  that  seem  most  sublime 
and  impersonal.  Man,  the  everlasting  prisoner  of  his 
self-love, "  cuts  and  carves  everything  he  encounters  on 
his  own  pattern."  He  continues :  "  And  I  myself,  first 
of  all,  I,  who  am  writing  this,  if  I  force  myself  to  love 
what  I  am  not,  or  even  the  contrary  of  what  I  am,  do  it 
not  through  detachment  from  the  ego ;  it  is  perhaps  be- 
cause I  take  pride  in  being  nothing  in  particular,  and 
like  myself  better  apparently  under  this  broken,  fugitive 
and  multiple  form,  than  under  any  other.  No,  no,  honest 
folk,  La  Rochefoucauld,  rightly  understood,  is  not  so 
easy  to  refute  as  you  suppose."1 

Closely  associated  with  his  cult  for  La  Rochefoucauld 
is  his  cult  for  La  Bruyere,  whose  view  of  life  coincides 
in  so  many  ways  with  that  of  La  Rochefoucauld,  and 
who  appealed  to  Sainte-Beuve  furthermore  by  his  con- 
summate art  in  literary  portrait-painting,  or,  as  one 
might  say,  in  the  literary  miniature.  He  remarks  on  the 
Countess  of  Albany's  copy  of  La  Bruyere  with  her 
marginal  notes  :  "  How  I  should  like  to  have  that  copy 
before  me  and  make  a  close  study  of  it.  Every  sincere 
heart,  every  sincere  intellect  might  thus  jot  down  all 
his  moral  life  on  the  margins  of  his  La  Bruyere.  He 
has  given  the  text,  you  have  only  to  add  the  variants." 2 

1  N.  Lundis,  V,  391.  a  N.  Lundis,  v,  427. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  111 

Elsewhere  he  advises  us  to  have  a  copy  of  La  Bruyere 
on  the  table  at  our  bedside.  Take  a  little  of  it  at  a  time 
and  frequently  and  he  promises  that  the  health  of  our 
minds  will  profit  by  the  prescription.1 

Both  La  Rochefoucauld  and  La  Bruyere,  it  has  been 
remarked,  have  a  view  of  human  nature  very  similar  to 
that  of  Christianity,  but  with  very  little  of  the  Christ- 
ian hope.  Pascal  would  have  said  that  they  had  a 
right  sense  of  man's  wretchedness  without  grace,  but  an 
insufficient  sense  of  the  grandeur  man  may  attain  with 
the  help  of  grace.  Sainte-Beuve  is  entirely  at  one  with 
La  Rochefoucauld  and  La  Bruyere  in  this  respect.  He 
can  at  least  admire  the  Jansenists  for  their  inexorable 
dealings  with  the  ordinary  facts  of  human  nature.  "  Let 
those  who  cannot  accept  the  remedies  proposed  by  these 
mournful  believers,"  he  says  of  them,  "  respect  them  at 
least  and  pity  them  as  fellow  creatures  for  having  felt 
so  deeply  on  certain  days  the  nothingness  and  wretch- 
edness of  human  nature,  that  ocean  of  vices  and  pains, 
and  its  murmur,  its  fury,  its  eternal  plaint." 2 

Sainte-Beuve  remained  to  the  end  a  "melancholy 
skeptic  who  is  not  sure  of  his  own  doubt."  But  from 
the  outset  he  had  been  temperamentally  with  the  natur- 
alists rather  than  with  the  supernaturalists,  and  the 
naturalistic  temper  grew  upon  him.  We  are  often  re- 
minded, by  the  forms  it  assumes,  of  the  whole  class  of 
doubters  known  in  the  seventeenth  century  as  the  liber- 
tins.  We  can  discover  in  Sainte-Beuve  a  direct  relation- 
ship to  several  of  these  liber  tins  besides  La  Rochefou- 

1  Lundis,  u,  66.  a  Port-Royal,  n,  115. 


112  MODERN   FRENCH  CRITICISM 

cauld.  Pascal  had  noted  this  secession  from  Christianity 
in  the  name  of  nature,  and  in  some  of  the  most  pene- 
trating pages  that  have  been  written  by  any  modern 
man  he  connects  this  naturalism  with  the  naturalism  of 
classical  antiquity.  Those  moderns,  he  says,  who  try  to 
live  purely  according  to  nature  without  the  inner  bal- 
ance wheel  of  faith,  fall  inevitably,  like  all  ancient  nat- 
uralists, either  into  the  extreme  of  stoic  pride  or  into 
that  of  epicurean  relaxation.  He  takes  Montaigne  as  a 
type  of  the  epicurean  skeptic  and  in  this  sense  the  greatest 
of  the  libertins.  Sainte-Beuve  accepts  substantially  this 
conception  of  Montaigne  in  several  of  the  most  brilliant, 
though  not  perhaps  soundest  chapters  of  his  "  Port- 
Royal"  (chapters  written  while  he  was  still  cultivating  a 
Jansenist  sensibility).  We  should  associate  with  these 
chapters  what  he  said  towards  the  end  of  his  life :  "  I 
have  reached  the  same  age  as  Bayle,  Horace  and  Mon- 
taigne, my  masters.  I  may  die."1  It  is  essential  for  a 
proper  understanding  of  Sainte-Beuve  to  determine  his 
relation  to  these  three  men,  and  first  of  all  to  Montaigne. 

in 

In  his  treatment  of  Montaigne  Sainte-Beuve  has  not 
altogether  avoided,  I  believe,  a  rather  common  error 
during  the  past  century  —  that  of  confusing  the  planes 
of  being.  Three  such  planes  may  be  distinguished  — 
the  religious,  the  humanistic,  the  naturalistic  —  though 
there  are,  of  course,  numerous  intermediary  stages,  the 
rounds  of  the  ladder,  as  it  were,  by  which  man  may 

*  Lundis,  xvi,  45. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  113 

mount  or  descend  from  one  level  to  another  of  his  being. 
On  which  of  these  planes  does  Montaigne  live?  We 
must  grant  Sainte-Beuve  at  once  that  he  is  not  at  home 
on  the  religious  level.  His  view  of  life  is  not  in  the  high- 
est degree  heroic,  it  is  certainly  not  saintly.  Like  Sainte- 
Beuve  himself,  Montaigne  idealizes  youth.  The  tempera- 
mental bent  is  already  visible  at  twenty,  and  Montaigne 
is  loath  to  believe  that  this  bent  can  be  traversed  and 
a  new  direction  given  a  man  by  some  miracle  of  grace 
or  conversion.  Montaigne,  says  Sainte-Beuve,  has  "  no 
notion  of  that  inverse  moral  and  spiritual  perfection, 
that  growing  maturity  of  the  inner  being  under  the 
withering  outer  envelope,  that  perpetual  education  for 
heaven,  that  second  birth  and  immortal  youth,  .  .  . 
which  makes  the  white-haired  old  man  seem  at  times 
only  in  his  first  bloom  for  the  eternal  springtime;  an 
illusion  perhaps,  and  a  last  Utopia,  but  of  the  kind  a 
Franklin  himself  cherished." l 

If  Montaigne  is  not  at  home  on  the  religious  level  of 
human  nature,  we  must  grant  Sainte-Beuve  that  he  is 
very  much  at  home  on  the  naturalistic  level.  He  has  the 
expansiveness  of  the  naturalist,  his  far-ranging  intellect- 
ual and  emotional  curiosity,  above  all  he  has  the  natur- 
alistic sense  of  flux  and  instability,  the  sense  of  all  that 
is  undulating  and  fugitive,  and  the  closely-allied  sense 
of  infinite  shades  of  difference  even  in  things  that  seem 
identical.  "  Distinguo"  he  declares,  "  is  the  most  uni- 
versal member  of  my  logic."  In  these  as  in  many  other 
respects  he  is  an  epicurean  naturalist,  and  Sainte-Beuve 
is  no  less  plainly  his  disciple. 

1  Port-Royal,  n,  430. 


114  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

But  what  about  the  intermediary  or  humanistic  level 
in  Montaigne  ?  One  becomes  humanistic  in  proportion 
as  he  grows  aware  of  that  law  of  order  and  measure 
and  decorum  that,  according  to  Cicero,  distinguishes 
man  from  other  living  creatures,  and  in  proportion  as 
he  imposes  the  discipline  of  this  law  upon  his  ordinary 
or  animal  self ;  in  proportion,  that  is,  as  he  aims  not 
merely  to  express  his  own  idiosyncrasy,  but  to  be  a  nor- 
mal man.  Now  this  humane  preoccupation,  so  far  from 
being  absent  from  the  work  of  Montaigne,  is,  I  believe, 
at  the  very  heart  of  it.  Montaigne,  says  Sainte-Beuve, 
is  pure  nature.  His  ambition  at  all  events  was  to  be 
pure  human  nature.  The  vagabondage  and  egotism  are 
more  or  less  superficial.  What  we  find  under  the  sur- 
face is  a  fairly  firm  conviction  based  on  the  Greek,  and 
especially  the  Latin,  classics,  as  to  what  the  true  man 
should  be ;  a  conception  which  in  the  somewhat  conven- 
tionalized form  of  the  honnete  homme  qui  ne  se  pique 
de  rien  —  the  gentleman  and  scholar  who  in  the  inter- 
est of  his  all-roundness  is  afraid  of  knowing  any  one 
thing  too  well  —  was  to  dominate  the  whole  neo-classical 
period.  Emerson  puts  us  on  the  right  track  when  he 
remarks  that  Montaigne  rises  to  passion  only  when  speak- 
ing of  Socrates,  and  relates  how  in  the  cemetery  of 
Pere  Lachaise,  at  Paris,  he  came  upon  the  tomb  of  an 
Auguste  Collignon,  who  died  in  1830,  and  who,  accord- 
ing to  the  inscription,  "  lived  to  do  right  and  had  formed 
himself  to  virtue  on  the  essays  of  Montaigne." 

Montaigne  is  misleading  because  unlike  most  people 
he  affects  not  more  but  less  certainty  than  he  feels. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  115 

He  obeys  in  part  a  humanistic  motive  in  his  very  skep- 
ticism, which  is  a  salutary  protest  against  the  "  horrible 
mania  of  certainty  "  that  had  possessed  the  theological 
ages,  and  was  still  afflicting  his  own  time. 

In  making  of  Montaigne  a  pure  naturalist,  Sainte- 
Beuve  has  fallen  in  too  far  with  the  tactics  of  Pascal 
and  the  Jansenists,  who  are  for  obliterating  all  the  in- 
termediary stages  of  purely  human  effort  and  virtue  by 
which  man  may  rise  above  the  naturalistic  level;  who 
are,  in  short,  for  opposing  a  stark  naturalism  to  a  stark 
supernaturalism,  so  that  man  may  have  no  resource  save 
in  their  theological  deus  ex  machina.  That  is  why  Jan- 
senism, we  may  remark  in  passing,  is  an  impracticable 
view  of  lif e.  Sainte-Beuve  makes  of  Montaigne  a  direct 
ancestor  of  Rousseau.  "  The  fair  foliage  of  his  essays," 
he  says,  "  is  later  to  become  a  dense  and  dark  and  ven- 
omous forest,  deadly  to  the  Werthers  and  other  dream- 
ers who  fall  asleep  in  its  shadow,  ...  a  tortuous  abode 
of  suicides,  etc." l  So  far  as  the  main  direction  of  Mon- 
taigne is  concerned,  this  is  not  only  untrue  but  the  ex- 
act opposite  of  the  truth.  Montaigne  is  moving  towards 
the  centre  of  human  nature ;  the  pure  naturalists, 
whether  sentimental  or  scientific,  are  moving  away  from 
the  centre,  no  matter  what  pseudo-mystical  devices  they 
may  employ  to  convince  themselves  and  us  of  the  con- 
trary. What  is  the  inevitable  upshot  of  Montaigne?  asks 
Sainte-Beuve.  " '  A  little  Jew,  walking  with  measured 
tread,' 2  is  going  to  tell  us :  ...  A  great  gloomy  heaven, 

1  Port-Royal,  n,  405. 

9  "  Un  petit  Juif  marchant  k  pas  compte's."  Voltaire's  description  of 
Spinoza. 


116  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

a  vast  revolving  universe,  dumb  and  unfathomable,  in 
which  from  time  to  time  and  in  certain  spots  life  makes 
its  appearance,  ...  in  which  man  comes  into  being, 
glittering  and  dying  with  the  thousand  insects  of  the 
hour  on  this  grassy  islet  floating  in  a  marsh,"  etc. 
"  All  that  is  cheerful  and  flattering  to  the  eye  in  Mon- 
taigne is  merely  there  to  curtain  the  abyss  or,  as  he 
would  have  said,  to  turf  the  tomb." l 

This  is  an  eloquent  assertion  of  the  hopelessness  and 
helplessness  of  a  pure  naturalism  in  dealing  with  ulti- 
mate problems.  But  so  far  as  its  relevancy  to  Montaigne 
is  concerned,  it  is  little  more  than  rhetoric ;  it  merely 
testifies  to  the  success  with  which  Sainte-Beuve  during 
the  time  he  was  writing  this  part  of  "  Port-Royal,"  had 
cultivated  a  Jansenist  sensibility.  The  humanist  certainly 
falls  short  of  the  saint,  but  he  is  just  as  certainly  superior 
to  the  pure  naturalist,  whether  stoic  or  epicurean,  to 
any  one,  in  short,  who  would  reduce  human  nature  and 
phenomenal  nature  to  a  common  law. 

IV 

The  same  point  may,  perhaps,  be  made  even  more 
clearly  by  comparing  Sainte-Beuve  with  another  of  the 
three  men  whom  he  claims  as  masters  —  Horace.  There 
is  a  side  of  Horace  that  is  more  obviously  and  grossly 
epicurean  than  anything  in  Sainte-Beuve.  Save  for  a 
mere  fraction  of  his  work,  Sainte-Beuve  is,  in  this  respect, 
at  the  opposite  pole  from  writers  like  Herrick,  who 
boasted,  as  Catullus  and  Martial  and  other  poets  had 

»  Port-Royal,  442. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  117 

boasted  before  him,  that  though  his  muse  was  "  jocund," 
his  life  was  chaste.  Yet  in  the  final  analysis  Horace  is 
more  humanistic  than  Sainte-Beuve.  He  had  been  more 
deeply  preoccupied  with  questions  of  conduct  ever  since 
his  boyhood  and  those  object  lessons  in  morality  he  had 
received  from  his  father.  Through  all  his  experimenting 
with  stoical  and  epicurean  tenets  we  can  trace  an  ascend- 
ing effort,  a  gradual  ripening  and  mellowing,  until  in 
the  most  amiable  and  undogmatic  fashion,  and  simply 
by  the  exercise  of  a  keen  good  sense,  he  comes  to  assert 
that  discipline  which  the  human  self  and  its  law  of 
measure  impose  on  the  ordinary  self.  "Dare  to  be  wise," 
is  the  sum  of  his  message.  "  A  right  beginning  is  more 
than  half  of  the  whole.  Despise  pleasures  and  bridle  and 
chain  the  mind.  If  you  do  not  command  it,  it  will  com- 
mand you."  l  In  one  of  his  last  poems  he  says  that  he  is 
neglecting  more  and  more  the  numbers  and  measures  of 
Latin  song  for  the  numbers  and  measures  of  the  true  life. 
He  is  preoccupied,  above  all,  with  the  problem  whether 
he  is  becoming  gentler  and  better  with  the  progress  of 

the  years: 

"  Lenior  et  melior  fis  accedente  senecta  ?  "  * 

Religion  goes  higher  than  this;  even  the  best  poetry 
goes  higher.  Yet  Horace's  confidence  in  the  power  of 
the  individual  to  perfect  himself  is  plain.  Let  us  quote 
by  contrast  a  sentence  of  Sainte-Beuve :  "  Ripen !  Ripen ! 
as  a  man  grows  older,  he  rots  in  some  places  and  hardens 
in  others,  but  he  does  not  ripen." 3  Sainte-Beuve's  hu- 

1  Epist.,  i,  2,  40-62.  a  Ibid.,  n,2,  211. 

»  Portraits  cont.,  v,  461. 


118  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

manism  is  not,  like  Horace's,  a  discipline  and  a  rule  of 
life ;  it  is  not  active,  erect,  and  militant,  but  has  retired 
from  the  intellect  and  will  to  the  sensibility,  and  so  is 
more  or  less  a  matter  of  passive  enjoyment.  It  bears 
about  the  same  relation  to  genuine  humanism  that  the 
aesthetic  faith  of  Chateaubriand  does  to  genuine  Christ- 
ianity. To  be  a  humanist,  even  in  this  restricted  sense, 
that  is,  to  be  one  of  the  most  exquisite  of  literary  epi- 
cureans, still  remains  a  rare  distinction.  And,  after  all, 
the  humanistic  fagade  to  Sainte-Beuve's  epicureanism 
is  substantial  compared  to  what  we  have  seen  in  later 
writers  —  Walter  Pater,  for  example.  If  Sainte-Beuve 
were  defined  as  an  aesthetic  humanist,  Pater  would  have 
to  be  defined  at  best  as  a  humanistic  aesthete. 

The  lapse  from  the  religious  or  humanistic  to  the 
naturalistic  level  of  being  is,  in  almost  a  literal  sense, 
decadent.  The  Rousseauistic  romanticist  usually  dissimu- 
lates this  lapse  under  a  veil  of  pseudo-idealism.  Of  the 
presence  of  this  false  illusion  of  decadence  in  Sainte- 
Beuve's  poetry  and  in  "  Volupte  "  I  have  already  said 
something.  His  own  contention  was  that  he  was  trying 
to  introduce  a  humbler  and  more  domestic  note  into 
French  verse,  in  imitation  of  Wordsworth  and  Crabbe. 
But  he  has  little  in  common  with  these  poets,  who  are 
themselves,  save  for  the  choice  of  lowly  subjects,  almost 
at  opposite  poles.  Sainte-Beuve's  poetry,  however,  espe- 
cially "  Joseph  Delorme, "  does  have  a  place  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  malady  of  the  age,  deriving  as  it  does  from 
Chateaubriand  and  pointing  the  way  in  its  choice,  not 
merely  of  the  humble,  but  of  the  repulsive,  subject  to 


SAINTE-BEUVE  119 

Baudelaire.  His  muse,  as  he  says,  is  not  a  brilliant 
odalisk,  who  dances  with  bared  bosom,  but  a  poor  con- 
sumptive, devoted  to  the  task  of  nursing  an  aged, 
blind  and  insane  father.  If  at  times  she  sings  in  order 
to  charm  away  his  delirious  terror,  she  is  interrupted  in 
the  midst  of  her  song  by  a  hacking  cough.  This  con- 
sumptive muse  would  have  inspired  horror  in  Words- 
worth, but  very  properly  took  under  her  protection 
"  Les  Fleurs  du  Mai."  "  You  are  right  in  saying,"  wrote 
Sainte-Beuve  to  Baudelaire,  "  that  my  poetry  had  much 
in  common  with  yours.  I  had  tasted  of  the  same  bitter 
fruit,  full  of  ashes  in  the  end." 1 

We  not  only  find  in  Sainte-Beuve  the  false  illusion 
of  decadence,  we  also  find  in  him  —  and  this  is  far  more 
important  for  our  present  purpose  —  its  false  disillusion. 
Wisdom,  for  Sainte-Beuve,  is  not  a  positive  insight, 
the  final  reward  of  the  struggle  for  self-mastery,  but 
something  cold  and  negative.  To  make  clear  this  con- 
ception of  wisdom,  we  shall  need  to  treat  from  the  point 
of  view  of  ideas  the  aspect  of  Sainte-Beuve's  life  that 
has  so  often  been  treated  from  the  point  of  view  of  gos- 
sip ;  or  rather  we  should  apply  his  own  method  to  him, 
and  let  him  speak  for  himself  in  this  matter.  We  should, 
so  far  as  possible,  dip  the  elements  of  our  judgment  of 
him,  as  he  phrases  it,  "out  of  his  own  inkwell."  "In  my 
youth,"  he  says,  speaking  in  the  person  of  Amaury  (the 
hero  of  "  Volupte"),  "  my  philosophy  came  to  me  espe- 
cially through  voluptuousness,  through  the  use  of  plea- 
sures." Most  philosophers,  he  goes  on  to  say,  do  their 

1  Cor.,  i,  360  (1865). 


120  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

meditating  in  the  plenitude  of  life  and  at  the  height  of 
illusion.  He,  on  the  contrary,  did  his  "in  the  pale  light 
of  the  morrow  that  follows  pleasures,  in  that  weariness 
of  which  Lucretius  speaks,  and  which  reveals  the  bottom 
of  things.  I  saw  constantly  the  seamy  side  and  the  end  of 
everything,  the  nothingness  which  I  already  felt  and 
the  foretaste  of  which  is  not  without  melancholy  de- 
lights." His  mind,  when  he  did  his  observing,  "  was  in 
a  state  of  slightly  icy  limpidity,  and  with  the  minimum 
of  illusion."  *  Sainte-Beuve  asserted  more  than  once  in 
his  own  name  this  strange  doctrine  that  the  truest 
vision  of  life  is  to  be  had  "  in  the  cold  gray  dawn  of  the 
morning  after."  "  I  have  had  my  weaknesses,"  he  writes 
magnificently,  "the  weaknesses  that  in  King  Solomon 
inspired  disgust  with  everything  and  satiety  of  life."2 
"Like  Solomon  and  Epicurus,"  he  says  elsewhere,  "I 
have  penetrated  into  philosophy  through  pleasure.  That 
is  better  than  to  reach  it  through  logic  like  Hegel  or 
Spinoza." 3  If  philosophy  is  to  be  attained  in  this  way, 
it  must  coincide  with  a  general  lack  of  convictions,  for, 
as  Sainte-Beuve  remarks  elsewhere,  voluptuousness  is 
a  great  dissolvent  of  the  inner  life.  "  The  principle  of 
certainty  in  us  is  undermined  by  it  in  the  long  run." 4 

The  truth  is,  Sainte-Beuve' s  emotional,  like  his  intel- 
lectual, life  was  almost  entirely  unchecked  and  expansive. 
Now  the  master  motive  of  a  life  that  expands  freely  in 
this  way  is  curiosity ;  and  Sainte-Beuve's  curiosity,  both 

1  Ltmdis,  xvi,  43. 

2  Cf.  "  II  ressentait  cet  incurable  dugout  de  toutes  choses  qui  est  parti' 
culier  k  ceux  qni  ont  abusd  des  sources  de  la  vie."  (Portraits  Cont.,  v,  464.) 

8  Port,  lit.,  in,  543.  *  Proudhon,  102. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  121 

intellectual  and  emotional,  was  enormous.  There  exists 
in  most  men,  he  says,  a  poet  who  dies  young.1  This  poet 
never  died  completely  in  Sainte-Beuve,  but  appears  to 
the  end  in  his  extremely  metaphorical  and  at  times  even 
flowery  style.  On  the  other  hand,  we  feel  even  during 
the  most  romantic  period  of  his  youth  that  there  existed 
in  him  alongside  the  poet  an  insatiably  curious  critic. 
It  is  even  truer,  perhaps,  that  he  is  a  critic  in  his  poetry 
than  that  he  is  a  poet  in  his  criticism.  "Did  Conrad," 
he  asks  in  one  of  his  poems,  "  know  Latin  better  than 
Jouy?  Did  he  use  up  fewer  pens  than  Suard?  Did  Doc- 
tor Guy  Patin  have  more  than  ten  thousand  volumes?"2 


The  particular  kind  of  curiosity  that  appears  in  this 
passage  suggests  the  affinity  between  Sainte-Beuve  and 
Bayle,  the  last  in  date  of  the  three  men  he  mentions  as 
his  masters.  "  It  is  incredible  how  much  Bayle  there  is 
in  Sainte-Beuve," 3  says  M.  Faguet.  And  Sainte-Beuve's 
kinship  to  Bayle  is  even  more  apparent  than  that  to 
Horace  and  Montaigne.  Bayle  was  converted  in  his 
youth  from  Protestantism  to  Catholicism  and  then  back 

1  Port,  lit.,  i,  415. 

2  See  the  whole  poem  Met  Livres  (Joseph  Delorme).    A  La  Rime,  per- 
haps the  best  of  his  poems,  is  at  least  semi-critical.  Several  of  his  hap- 
piest critical  phrases  are  found  in  the  poems,  e.g. :  — 

"  Lamartine  ignorant,  qui  ne  sait  que  son  Sine" 
and 

"  Vigny,  plus  secret, 
Comme  en  M  tour  <f  it>oir«,  avant  midi,  rentrait." 

(Both  from  the  poetical  epistle  "  A   M.  Villcmain.") 
8  Politiques  et  moralistes,  m,  208. 


122  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

again  to  Protestantism,  and  lost  all  his  fire  of  faith  in 
these  changes  of  creed.  He  finally  became  a  libertine, 
though  only  in  the  seventeenth-century  sense,  and  not, 
like  Sainte-Beuve,  in  the  nineteenth-century  sense  as 
well.  We  should  note,  however,  regarding  his  emotional 
curiosity  (not  to  speak  of  the  rumor  that  he  made  love 
to  Madame  Jurieu),  the  somewhat  morbid  predilection 
for  certain  kinds  of  anecdotes  that  is  familiar  to  all  read- 
ers of  the  Dictionary.  Bayle's  intellectual  curiosity  is  at 
all  events  unbounded.  "  There  are  minds,"  says  Sainte- 
Beuve,  "  the  vocation  of  which  is  to  know  simply  for 
the  sake  of  knowing ;  minds  which  the  passion  of  Faust 
possesses,  and  which  do  not  refer  back  their  acquisitions 
and  efforts  to  the  supreme  and  perfect  goal  capable  of 
rectifying  them." l 

Sainte-Beuve  was,  like  Bayle,  insatiably  curious  even 
about  the  trivial  ("  Did  Conrad  use  up  fewer  pens  than 
Suard?").  Faguet  says  that  Bayle  must  have  gossiped 
over  his  evening  meal  with  his  housekeeper.  He  goes 
rather  far,  however,  when  he  adds  that  his  books,  like 
those  of  Sainte-Beuve,  frequently  savor  of  the  servants' 
hall  and  a  bit  of  the  pantry. 2  Like  Bayle,  Sainte-Beuve 
is  more  likely  to  fall  into  the  gossipy  and  familiar  vein 
in  his  notes  than  in  his  main  text  (as  he  says,  one  feels 
more  at  home  on  the  ground  floor  than  in  the  grand 
apartments  upstairs).  Like  Bayle,  too,  he  has  a  way  of 
insinuating  into  his  notes  some  of  his  boldest  statements, 
and  like  Bayle's,  his  method,  especially  before  1848,  is 
at  times  feline  and  perfidious.  He  undermines  by  subtle 
i  Port-Royal,  H,  160.  *  XVII I*  Siecle,  23. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  123 

indirections  what  he  is  appearing  to  praise.  "  God  save 
me  from  being  eulogized  by  you,"  said  one  of  the  Gon- 
courts  to  him  at  a  Magny  dinner. 

We  are  dwelling,  however,  on  the  smaller  side  of  the 
likeness  between  the  two  men.  What  Bayle  stands  for 
in  the  history  of  thought  is  the  idea  of  tolerance,  and 
it  is  on  this  side,  after  all,  that  we  are  to  seek  for  the 
important  relationship  between  him  and  Sainte-Beuve. 
No  Frenchman  of  the  nineteenth  century  was  more 
afraid  than  Sainte-Beuve  of  that  narrowing  of  the 
mind  that  comes  from  preconceived  ideas  or  party 
spirit.  "  To  the  deuce  with  all  fetishes,"  he  said,  "  of 
whatever  wood  they  are  manufactured."  Sainte-Beuve 
was  in  this  respect  a  true  disciple  of  Bayle  and  not  like 
so  many  of  his  followers  in  the  eighteenth  century  and 
since,  who  have  managed  to  be  fanatical  in  their  very 
preaching  of  tolerance.  Sainte-Beuve  relates  how  one 
day  M.  Franck  of  the  College  de  France  was  giving  an 
address  on  tolerance.  Some  one  present  ventured  to 
show  disagreement,  whereupon  he  was  slapped  by  the 
person  seated  next  to  him,  and  finally  thrown  out  of 
the  hall  by  an  audience  that  had  grown  enthusiastic 
over  tolerance ! l  Sainte-Beuve  adds  that  intolerance  is 
the  French  fault  par  excellence,  and  this  is,  of  course, 
due  to  the  tendency  of  the  Frenchman  to  carry  to  an 
excess  his  virtue  of  logicality,  and  then  to  put  emo- 
tion into  the  service  of  his  logic.  Sainte-Beuve  was 
acutely  conscious  of  the  difference  between  the  work- 
ings of  his  own  mind  in  this  respect  and  that  of  most 

*  N.  Lundit,  ix,  197. 


124  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Frenchmen.  He  deals  with  life  and  literature  with  a 
maximum  of  good  sense  and  a  minimum  of  mere  logical 
exclusiveness,  and  this  is  of  course  a  trait  that  appeals 
strongly  to  the  English  and  American  reader.  The  stu- 
dent of  heredity  might  attach  some  weight  to  the  fact 
that  he  had  English  blood. 

We  must,  however,  show  care  in  defining  the  par- 
ticular type  of  tolerance  displayed  by  Sainte-Beuve  and 
Bayle.  The  highest  type,  as  Sainte-Beuve  himself  says, 
is  the  tolerance  that  is  allied,  not  with  the  contempt  for 
everything,  but  with  a  profound  faith  in  something.1 
The  tolerance  of  Sainte-Beuve  and  Bayle  can  scarcely 
be  said  to  be  of  this  latter  type,  but  rather  of  the  skep- 
tical and  epicurean  variety  that  is  so  widespread  in  the 
world  to-day.  They  enter  with  an  admirable  breadth  of 
comprehensive  sympathy  into  all  the  modes  of  being, 
but  when  it  comes  to  drawing  conclusions  are  pure 
Pyrrhonists.  "  Who  am  I,"  says  Sainte-Beuve,  "  to  de- 
cide in  the  name  of  absolute  truth  ? " 2  He  sets  aside 
every  preference  of  his  own  and  merely  tries  to  estab- 
lish the  two  extreme  poles  without  inclining  in  favor  of 
either,  and  thus  to  give  to  thought  its  full  and  free 
play.3  The  only  role  that  befits  him,  he  says  again,  "  is 
to  balance  over  against  one  another  the  diverse  and 
changing  aspects  of  incomprehensible  reality."4 

Sainte-Beuve  took  this  somewhat  neutral  view  of  criti- 
cism more  particularly  in  what  I  have  termed  his  middle 
period.  From  this  point  of  view,  the  article  he  wrote 

1  N.  Lundis,  ix,  199.  a  Port-Royal,  m,  409. 

8  Port-Royal,  H,  155.  *  Ibid.,  in,  423. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  125 

in  1835  on  "  Bayle  and  the  Critical  Spirit "  is  almost 
autobiographical.  The  extent  to  which  he  reduced  the 
critic's  role  at  this  time  to  mere  comprehension  and  sym- 
pathy may  also  be  seen  in  a  "  thought "  like  the  following : 
"  The  critical  spirit  is  by  nature  facile,  insinuating,  mo- 
bile and  comprehensive.  It  is  a  great  and  limpid  stream 
which  winds  and  bends  its  way  about  the  works  and 
monuments  of  poetry,  as  about  so  many  rocks,  fortresses, 
vine-clad  hills  and  leafy  valleys  that  border  its  shores. 
While  each  one  of  these  objects  remains  fixed  in  the 
landscape  and  cares  little  for  the  other,  while  the  feudal 
tower  disdains  the  valley,  and  the  valley  knows  nothing 
of  the  hillside,  the  stream  goes  from  one  to  the  other, 
bathes  them  without  doing  them  violence,  embraces  them 
in  its  living  waters,  comprehends  them,  reflects  them,  and 
when  the  traveller  is  curious  to  know  and  visit  these  varied 
spots,  it  takes  him  in  a  boat,  carries  him  smoothly  along, 
and  unfolds  to  him  in  succession  all  the  changing  spec- 
tacle of  its  course."1  M.  Lemaitre  took  this  passage  as 
motto  for  his  impressionistic  "  Contemporains."  Per- 
haps it  fits  the  dilettante2  even  more  than  the  impres- 
sionist, for  the  impressionist,  in  lieu  of  fixed  principles, 
has  at  least  sharp  temperamental  exclusions,  whereas  the 
critic,  as  Sainte-Beuve  defines  him  at  this  time,  neither 
excludes  nor  concludes.  The  critic  is  a  sort  of  gypsy 
or  vagrant  in  the  intellectual  world,  without  settled  abode 
of  his  own,  that  is,  without  any  central  and  dominating 
point  of  view ;  or  to  use  another  of  Sainte-Beuve's  com- 

1  Joseph  Delorme,  Pens^e  xvii.  Cf.  also  Portraits  Cont.,  u,  612. 
>  As  the  term  is  defined  in  the  chapter  on  Ilenan  (p.  279). 


126  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

parisons,  is  like  an  actor  who  assumes  every  evening  a 
new  role. 

This  conception  of  the  critic  could  scarcely  satisfy 
Sainte-Beuve  permanently,  nor  could  he  fail  to  feel 
the  differences  as  well  as  the  similarities  between  Bayle 
and  himself.  Bayle's  curiosity  is  not  only  omnivorous, 
but  indiscriminate.  He  gives,  as  has  been  pointed  out, 
ten  times  more  space  in  his  "  Dictionary  "  to  D' Assoucy 
than  to  Dante.  Aristotle  or  Peckins,  as  M.  Faguet  puts 
it,  is  all  the  same  to  him.  His  attitude  towards  the  liter- 
ature of  his  own  time  is  essentially  journalistic.  "  The 
last  book  I  see,"  he  writes,  "is  the  one  I  prefer  to  all 
others."  He  is  equally  interested,  for  example,  in  the 
"Phedre"  of  Racine  and  that  of  Pradon.1  Now  Sainte- 
Beuve  was  not  only  literary  to  his  finger-tips,  but  as  he 
got  away  from  the  special  atmosphere  of  the  romantic 
movement,  he  became  more  and  more  classical.  One  may 
say,  indeed,  that  with  increasing  age  his  hold  upon  the 
Christian  tradition  lessened  and  that  upon  the  human- 
istic tradition  grew  stronger.  Furthermore,  as  he  ma- 
tured and  got  more  confidence  in  himself,  he  felt  it  was 
not  enough  for  the  critic  to  be  comprehensive  and  sym- 
pathetic, he  must  also  be  judicial.  "I  have  played  the 
part  of  an  advocate  long  enough,"  he  exclaims,  "let 
me  now  play  that  of  judge." 2  As  a  result  of  thus  feeling 
the  need  of  being  more  judicial  at  the  same  time  that 
he  was  becoming  more  classical  in  temper,  he  was  led 
to  honor  Boileau,  a  critic  who  was  in  the  highest  de- 
gree judicial  along  traditional  lines,  and  almost  at  the 
»  Port,  lit.,  i,  382.  *  Ibid.,  ra,  550. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  127 

opposite  pole  of  criticism  to  Bayle.  He  had  always,  he 
tells  us,  lived  in  imagination  with  Boileau,  but  in  his 
attitude  towards  him  he  went  through  several  phases. 
There  is  first  the  brisk  romantic  attack  of  1829,1  then  the 
partial  palinode  of  1843,2  and  finally  the  full  tribute  of 
admiration  and  praise  in  the  article  of  1852.3 

We  may  also  trace  in  Sainte-Beuve  an  interesting 
relationship  to  Goethe.  Some  of  his  earlier  references 
are  very  superficial,  as,  for  example,  when  he  contrasts 
the  spiritual  elevation  of  Pascal  with  the  lack  of  it  in 
Goethe  and  Talleyrand  ! 4  Later  he  makes  ample  repara- 
tion. He  pronounces  Goethe  the  greatest  of  critics,5  and 
when  he  is  looking  for  a  high  critical  impartiality  to 
oppose  to  the  excess  of  partisanship  he  found  in  his 
French  contemporaries,  he  thinks  of  Goethe  even  more 
than  of  Bayle.  "  0  immense  lake,  vast  and  calm  mir- 
ror of  Goethe,  where  art  thou?"6  he  exclaims.  Sainte- 
Beuve  was  himself  in  this  respect  the  most  Goethean  of 
Frenchmen.  When  an  admiring  correspondent  compared 
him  to  Goethe,  however,  he  replied  :  "  He  naturally  lived 
on  the  summits,  whereas  I  have  been  a  dweller  in  the 
valley."7  The  difference  is  really  even  more  funda- 
mental. The  final  impression  one  carries  away  from 
Sainte-Beuve  is  that  of  a  man  who  has  suffered  an  inner 
defeat ;  from  Goethe,  that  of  a  man  who  has  fought  and 
conquered.  Sainte-Beuve,  during  his  later  period,  was 
at  all  events  very  much  at  one  with  Goethe  in  aiming  to 

1  Port,  lit.,  i,  3  ft.  *  Ibid.,  23  ff . 

8  Lundis,  vi,  494  ff.  4  Port-Royal,  m,  356. 

6  Lundis,  xi,  505.  •  Lundis,  XV,  368. 

7  Cor.,  n,  3. 


128  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

be  both  a  humanist  and  a  naturalist ;  to  unite  the  most 
comprehensive  sympathy  for  the  modern  movement  with 
the  cult  of  literary  tradition. 

Perhaps  the  best  way  to  understand  Sainte-Beuve's 
critical  activity  during  his  last  twenty  years  is  to  study 
in  him  this  interplay  and  at  times  conflict  of  naturalism 
and  humanism.  I  have  been  trying  in  this  chapter  to 
relate  him  in  his  naturalism  to  the  "libertines"  of  the 
seventeenth  century  and  to  the  epicureans  of  all  ages. 
But  to  grasp  his  critical  method,  it  is  needful  to  go  more 
f ully  than  hitherto  into  certain  forms  of  naturalism  that 
belong  especially  to  the  nineteenth  century. 


VI 

SAINTE-BEUVE  (AFTER  1848) 

IN  his  loss  of  romantic  illusions  Sainte-Beuve  antici- 
pated by  only  a  few  years  the  course  of  the  century 
itself.  The  culmination  of  political  romanticism  in  the 
Revolution  of  1848  was  followed  by  sudden  and  violent 
disenchantment.  The  fairest  millennial  visions  had  col- 
lapsed at  the  first  contact  with  reality.  The  "idealists  " 
had  had  an  abrupt  descent  from  the  clouds,  and  lay 
bruised  and  bleeding  upon  the  earth.  What  really  goes 
with  the  naturalistic  view  of  life  is  imperialism.  Those 
who  would  set  up  as  idealists  and  at  the  same  time  live 
on  the  naturalistic  level  simply  hasten  the  triumph  of 
the  opposite  cause  to  that  they  are  preaching.  Thus 
the  men  of  '48  proclaimed  an  "evangelical"  republic, 
and  the  paroxysm  of  hideous  anarchy  that  ensued  pre- 
pared the  way  for  the  coup  d'etat  of  1851,  and  the  ad- 
vent of  the  densest  materialism  the  world  had  seen  since 
the  Roman  decadence.  This  is  the  true  romantic  irony 
—  far  more  poignant  than  what  usually  goes  by  that 
name.  Sainte-Beuve  says  that  the  example  of  Napoleon 
had  done  much  to  corrupt  the  nineteenth  century  and 
encourage  the  cult  of  mere  force  even  in  literature.  But 
Napoleon  himself  is  only  the  ironical  reply  of  the  Nature 
of  Things  to  the  Utopias  of  the  French  Revolution.  It 
was  scarcely  due  to  Napoleon  that  Sainte-Beuve  himself 


130  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

showed  traces  of  the  imperialistic  temper, — an  undue 
partiality  at  times  for  the  prevailing  faction.  When 
any  sweeping  is  going  on,  it  is  well,  as  the  French  say- 
ing has  it,  to  be  on  the  side  of  the  broom  handle.  I  be- 
lieve that  there  were  more  honorable  motives  for  the 
promptness  with  which  Sainte-Beuve  accepted  the  Sec- 
ond Empire.  Still  it  was  unfortunate  that  in  his  article 
"Les  Regrets,"1  he  should  have  given  even  the  appear- 
ance of  insulting  the  vanquished  and  rejoicing  over 
their  discomfiture. 

I 

From  the  bankruptcy  of  romantic  idealism  most  men 
of  the  mid-nineteenth  century  drew  the  inference  that 
all  idealism  is  vain.  It  was  time,  they  reasoned,  to  cease 
dreaming  and  face  the  facts.  Man  himself  they  would 
treat  as  a  fact,  subject  to  the  same  laws  as  other  phe- 
nomena. In  striking  contrast  to  the  wreckage  of  romantic 
hopes  that  littered  the  earth  was  the  structure  of  solid 
achievement  that  the  scientists  were  gradually  raising 
by  patient  submission  to  the  facts.  In  science  man  might 
recover  part  of  that  faith  in  himself  that  had  just  been 
so  seriously  shaken.  Now  the  age  in  taking  this  trend  was 
in  a  sense  following  the  line  of  Sainte-Beuve's  own  de- 
velopment. He  had  also  become  a  positivist  in  his  own 
way.  He  had  taken  as  his  seal  the  English  word  Truth, 
by  which  he  meant  of  course  relative  and  contingent 
truth,  the  establishing  of  the  facts.  "  If  I  had  a  motto," 
he  said,  "it  would  be  the  true,  the  true  alone.  And  as 
for  the  good  and  the  beautiful  they  might  come  off  as 
1  Lundis,!,  397  ff. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  131 

best  they  could."1  In  his  passion  for  authenticity,  in 
his  almost  morbid  fear  of  being  duped,  he  would  not 
only  get  at  the  truth,  but  as  the  French  put  it,  at  the 
true  truth,  which  is  sometimes  very  different  from  the 
mere  truth.  Though  his  attitude  towards  literature  is 
not  primarily  scientific,  he  satisfied  the  strictest  scientific 
standards  in  his  scrupulosity  as  to  facts.  The  graceful- 
ness of  the  superstructure  in  his  essays  is  equalled  by 
the  solidity  of  the  foundations.  "  You  would  have  had 
to  know  Sainte-Beuve,"  says  Scherer,  "to  realize  the 
almost  morbid  importance  that  he  attached  to  the  spell- 
ing of  a  proper  name,  to  a  bit  of  information,  to  a  date. 
He  wished  to  see  everything  with  his  own  eyes,  to  verify 
everything." 2 

On  the  purely  naturalistic  side,  therefore,  Sainte-Beuve 
felt  very  much  at  home  in  the  new  age.  He  saw  a  gen- 
eration of  younger  men  coming  up  with  Taine  and  Re- 
nan  at  their  head,  who  were  in  many  respects  his  own 
disciples  and  by  whom  he  was  influenced  in  turn.  He 
did  not  seem,  like  Lamartine  and  others,  a  forlorn  sur- 
vivor into  an  uncongenial  epoch,  but  was  stimulated  to 
do  some  of  his  best  work.  Here  again,  however,  we 
must  make  some  important  distinctions.  It  is  difficult  to 
make  too  many  distinctions  in  writing  of  Sainte-Beuve. 
He  remained  the  skeptic  to  the  end,  "holding  no  form 
of  creed  but  contemplating  all ";  convinced  with  Bayle, 
that  the  only  hope  is  in  a  moderate  and  reasonable 
human  nature,  and  at  the  same  time  that  human  nature 
never  can  be  moderate  and  reasonable;  convinced  above 
1  Cor.,  n,  41.  *  Etudes,  iv,  107. 


132  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

all  with  La  Rochefoucauld  that  human  nature  can  never 
be  disinterested.  But  man  it  would  appear  is  an  incur- 
ably religious  animal.  If  deprived  of  other  objects  of 
worship  he  will  fall  to  worshipping  himself.  And  this  is 
what  those  who  were  influenced  by  Bayle  in  the  eight- 
eenth century  actually  did.  This  idolatry  of  humanity 
and  its  future  progress  is  almost  universal  among  our 
modern  naturalists  and  separates  them  from  those  seven- 
teenth-century "libertines"  with  whom  I  have  been 
comparing  Sainte-Beuve. 

What  was  Sainte-Beuve's  own  attitude  towards  the 
idea  of  progress,  and  in  general  towards  the  great  God- 
dess Humanity  before  whose  image  we  are  all  prostrated 
so  devoutly  to-day?  Here  again  we  must  distinguish. 
There  are  evidently  two  main  classes  of  humanitarians, 
not  to  speak  of  the  blendings  of  the  two  types,  and  the 
sub-varieties  of  each.  First  there  are  the  humanitarians 
who  believe  that  mankind  as  a  whole  is  going  to  be 
regenerated  by  the  triumph,  in  some  manner  or  other, 
either  evolutionary  or  revolutionary,  of  the  principle  of 
fraternity  or  social  pity  over  self-love.  In  the  second  place 
there  are  the  humanitarians  who  believe  that  mankind  is 
to  be  regenerated  through  science.  The  disciple  of  La 
Rochefoucauld  who  had  been  unable  to  feel  the  religious 
hope  in  the  salvation  of  the  individual,  was  not  likely  to 
fall  in  with  the  hope  of  the  sentimental  humanitarian  in 
the  salvation  of  the  race.  I  do  not  mean  to  accuse  Sainte- 
Beuve  of  heartlessness.  He  speaks,  indeed,  as  we  have 
seen,  of  the  "  death "  of  his  heart,  and  so  far  as  the 
religious  intuitions  are  concerned,  I  believe  that  this  is 


SAINTE-BEUVE  133 

true.  But  though  one  of  the  most  irritable,  Sainte-Beuve 
was  also  one  of  the  kindliest  of  men,  —  even  more  cap- 
able of  sympathy  perhaps  for  the  poor  and  the  humble 
than  for  men  of  his  own  class.  "  The  heart  of  Joseph 
Delorme,"  we  read  in  the  Life  prefixed  to  the  Poems, 
"  was  divided  between  an  unbounded  love  for  the  suffer- 
ing portion  of  humanity  and  an  implacable  hatred  for 
the  powerful  of  this  world."  Joseph  Delorme,  in  short, 
embodied  in  himself  both  the  rebellion  and  the  social 
pity  of  the  Rousseauist,  and  something  of  Delorme  sur- 
vived in  Sainte-Beuve  to  the  end.  Though  unable  to  acqui- 
esce in  the  humanitarian  creed  he  had  a  good  deal  of  the 
humanitarian  temper  as  appears  in  the  volume  he  devoted 
to  the  agitator  Proudhon. 

One  who,  like  Sainte-Beuve,  saw  barbarism  always  trem- 
bling just  beneath  the  surface  of  human  nature,  is  at  best, 
however,  a  doubtful  recruit  for  either  scientific  or  senti- 
mental humanitarians.  "  He  who  has  not  witnessed,"  he 
says,  "an  army  of  brave  men  in  complete  rout,  or  a 
political  assembly  that  supposed  itself  sensible  thrown 
into  a  frenzy  by  some  passionate  speech,  does  not  know 
to  what  point  it  remains  true  that  man  at  bottom  is  only 
an  animal  and  a  child.  0  eternal  childhood  of  the  human 
heart!"  *  No  wonder  he  looked  doubtfully  on  man's  at- 
tempt to  set  up  his  own  image  for  worship  in  the  sanc- 
tuary left  vacant  by  la  grande  absence  de  Dieu.  In  the 
course  of  one  of  the  finest  tributes  that  have  ever  been 
paid  to  Moliere  (the  greatest  of  all  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury "libertines"),  Sainte-Beuve  writes  that  "to  love 

1  Port,  lit.,  ill,  549. 


134  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Moliere  is  to  make  sure  of  not  falling  into  a  smug  and 
limitless  admiration  for  a  humanity  that  idolizes  itself, 
and  forgets  of  what  stuff  it  is  made  and  that  it  is  al- 
ways, try  as  it  may,  only  puny  human  nature."1  Perhaps 
it  is  not  well  to  become  quite  so  expert  as  Sainte-Beuve 
in  the  art  of  detecting  self-seeking.  He  comments  as 
follows  on  one  of  the  most  disenchanted  thoughts  of 
Marcus  Aurelius:  "And  so  Marcus  Aurelius  drank  his 
chalice,  too,  but  he  drank  it  in  silence.  He  did  not  cry 
out  like  that  cynical  revolutionist : 2  '  I  Ve  had  my  fill  of 
men*  (Je  suis  soul  des  hommes),  but  he  thought  it. 
Cicero  too  said  it  in  his  manner.  This  feeling  of  nausea 
at  men  often  came  upon  him  and  there  was  a  moment 
when  everything  appeared  odious  to  him  except  death. 
Caesar  towards  the  end  no  longer  took  the  trouble  to  de- 
fend his  life.  He  seemed  to  say:  'Let  them  take  it,  if 
they  want  it.'  We  arrive  at  this  same  feeling  of  disgust 
by  all  paths.  It  is  enough  to  have  lived  a  long  time  and 
to  have  had  too  close  dealings  with  the  human  species." 
It  is  to  be  feared  that  any  one  who  has  come  to  feel  in 
that  way  will  not  be  able  to  profit  by  John  Morley's 
advice  and  satisfy  his  religious  sense  by  communing 
with  Humanity  in  its  past,  present,  and  future. 

Yet,  after  all,  Sainte-Beuve's  nearest  approach  to  a 
definite  belief  is  his  belief  in  scientific  progress.  "  If  we 
go  beyond  the  ephemeral  triflings,"  he  says,  "of  present 
literature,  which  cumber  up  the  front  of  the  stage  and 
obstruct  one's  gaze,  there  is  in  this  age  a  great  and 
powerful  movement  in  every  direction,  in  every  science. 
1  N.  Lundis,  v,  278.  a  Danton. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  135 

Our  nineteenth  century  in  contradistinction  to  the  eight- 
eenth is  not  dogmatic,  it  seems  to  avoid  giving  its  opin- 
ion, it  is  in  no  haste  to  conclude.  There  are  even  little 
superficial  reactions  which  it  seems  to  favor  by  fearing 
to  oppose  them.  But  patience!  At  every  point  men  are 
at  work  —  in  physics,  chemistry,  zoology,  botany,  in  all 
branches  of  natural  history,  in  historical  and  philosoph- 
ical criticism,  in  oriental  studies,  in  archaeology,  every- 
thing is  being  gradually  transformed,  and  the  day  when 
the  century  takes  the  trouble  to  draw  its  conclusions, 
you  will  see  that  it  is  at  a  hundred  leagues,  a  thousand 
leagues,  from  its  point  of  departure.  The  vessel  is  in 
the  open  sea.  The  knots  are  reeled  off  without  being 
counted.  The  day  when  men  take  their  bearings  they 
will  be  amazed  at  the  distance  they  have  covered."1 
This  sounds  encouraging,  though  it  does  not  tell  us 
where  we  are  going,  but  merely  that  we  are  on  the  way. 
Sainte-Beuve  quotes  with  approval  the  saying  of  Pascal 
that "  the  inventions  of  men  increase  from  age  to  age, 
but  that  the  goodness  and  badness  of  the  world  remain 
in  general  the  same,"  and  adds  that  he  should  like  to 
see  this  saying  used  as  epigraph  for  all  our  grandiose 
theories  of  progress.2 

I  have  already  spoken  of  the  interplay  and  conflict 
of  the  humanistic  and  naturalistic  elements  in  Sainte- 
Beuve's  later  writing.  It  is  perhaps  the  main  form  in 
him  of  the  opposition  between  thought  and  feeling  (for 
his  humanism  is  largely  a  matter  of  feeling)  that  so 
permeates  our  modern  period.  One  must  of  course  not 

1  Port,  lit.,  ra,  549.  a  Port-Royal,  H,  261. 


136  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

be  over  hasty  in  setting  down  as  a  contradiction  what  is 
one  of  Sainte-Beuve's  most  admirable  traits  —  his  readi- 
ness to  observe  impartially  and  record  all  the  facts  with- 
out attempting  to  reduce  them  to  some  premature  system. 
Still  the  contradiction  exists.  If  as  a  scientific  natur- 
alist he  believed  in  progress  (with  the  serious  reserva- 
tion we  have  just  seen),  as  a  humanist  he  believed  in 
decadence.  That  is  precisely  the  significance  of  the 
volume  on  Chateaubriand  —  the  first  in  which  he  delib- 
erately sets  out  to  be  a  judicial  critic.  He  makes  a  hu- 
manistic survey  of  Chateaubriand  and  concludes  that  he 
is  the  first  great  writer  of  the  decadence,  the  writer 
who  transferred  the  capital  of  French  prose  from  Rome 
to  Byzantium.  Like  Voltaire  or  Nisard,  he  accepts  the 
theory  of  the  classic  age  and  asserts  that  his  own  time 
is  already  on  the  descending  curve.  "  I  believe  to  my 
great  regret,"  he  says,  "(and  I  held  out  against  the  be- 
lief as  long  as  I  could)  that  literature  is  on  the  highroad 
to  corruption."1  This  stand  implied,  of  course,  an  open 
rupture  with  much  of  his  own  literary  past  and  his  as- 
sociates in  it.  In  his  attitude  towards  the  romanticists, 
especially  the  romantic  poets — Hugo,  Lamartine,  Vigny, 
etc.  —  Sainte-Beuve  is  supposed  to  have  been  influenced 
by  the  jealousy  of  the  unsuccessful  creator  for  those 
whose  creations  have  succeeded.  But  there  is  a  larger 
aspect  even  to  what  seem  the  most  personal  of  his  feuds 
and  animosities.  He  was  only  too  capable  of  rancor,  but 
he  has  in  turn  suffered  more  than  most  men  from  rancor 
in  others.  The  reason  he  himself  has  very  clearly  stated : 

1  Chateaubriand,  I,  102. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  137 

"  Parties  and  sects  have  a  deadly  grudge  against  any 
one  who,  having  passed  through  them,  has  refused  to 
bind  himself  to  them  irrevocably.  I  have  given  no  one 
the  right  to  say  '  He  is  one  of  us/  I  have  certainly  had 
my  vices  and  weaknesses,  but  it  is  for  what  is  good  in 
me,  for  my  love  of  integrity  and  truth  and  my  inde- 
pendence of  judgment,  that  I  have  irritated  so  many 
people  in  my  life  and  aroused  so  much  wrath."  L  Thus 
the  romanticists  and  their  partisans  have  borne  Sainte- 
Beuve  a  deadly  grudge  and  have  sought  to  explain  on 
personal  grounds  opinions  that  contain  a  serious  judg- 
ment. Like  Goethe,  Sainte-Beuve  as  he  grew  older  sided 
more  and  more  with  the  Olympians  against  the  Titans. 
It  is  as  a  humanist  that  he  protests  against  the  violence 
and  excess  of  Hugo's  romanticism,  against  the  violence 
and  excess  of  the  naturalism  of  Balzac.  Later,  under  the 
compliments  he  lavishes  on  his  friend  and  admirer,  Taine, 
one  can  distinguish  the  same  note  of  protest  against 
the  dehumanizing  tendencies  of  an  excessive  naturalism. 
"  In  spite  of  everything,"  he  writes  to  a  correspondent 
in  explanation  of  his  small  esteem  for  Balzac,  "  I  have 
continued  of  the  classic  school,  that  of  Horace  and  the 
singer  of  Windsor  Forest."2  Yet  nothing  sounder  and 
juster  has  been  written  on  Balzac  than  Sainte-Beuve's 
article  of  1850,3  only  a  few  years  after  Balzac's  outrag- 
eous diatribe  against  him  in  the  "  Revue  parisienne  " 
(1840). 

Sainte-Beuve  will  never,  I  believe,  rank  with  Boileau 
in  the  sureness  of  his  judgments  on  contemporaries. 
1  Lundis,  xvi,  44.      3  Nouvelle  Cor.,  235.      3  Lundis,  n,  413  ff. 


138  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Yet  as  the  nineteenth  century,  with  its  own  special  at- 
mosphere, recedes  into  the  distance,  these  judgments 
are  likely  to  be  increasingly  accepted.  Indeed  French- 
men are  already  coming  around  to  them  now  that  they 
are  beginning  to  react  against  the  romantic  and  natur- 
alistic movements.  The  "  Chateaubriand  "  which  called 
forth  the  most  opposition  and  which  suffers  from  an 
unmistakable  bitterness  of  tone,  is  not  only  one  of  the 
most  interesting  of  Sainte-Beuve's  works,  but  may  also 
turn  out  to  be  one  of  the  most  judicious.  In  his  recent 
book  on  the  same  subject,  M.  Lemaitre  has  done  little 
more  than  reaffirm  Sainte-Beuve,  the  only  difference 
being  that  as  he  unveils  depth  upon  depth  of  romantic 
egotism  in  Chateaubriand,  he  keeps  repeating  that,  with 
all  his  faults,  "  we  love  him  still." 

ii 

Sainte-Beuve  lived  in  an  age  when  it  was  especially 
difficult  to  adjust  the  claims  of  the  real  and  the  ideal  in 
art.  His  perfect  tact  and  measure  and  good  sense  can 
always  be  counted  on  to  put  him  on  his  guard  against 
everything  that  is  extreme  and  one-sided,  whether  it 
claims  to  be  ideal  or  naturalistic.  He  was  impatient  of 
those  who  set  up  as  idealists,  but  were  in  reality  only 
romantic  dreamers,  as  well  as  of  those  who  set  up  as 
idealists  and  were  in  reality  only  pseudo-classic  formal- 
ists. "  0  ye  friends  of  the  ideal,"  he  writes  with  spe- 
cial reference  to  these  latter,  "  I  am  not  going  to  quarrel 
with  you.  I  grant  that  there  is  an  ideal ;  but  grant  too 
that  there  is  a  true  and  a  false  one,  and  if  ever  you 


SAINTE-BEUVE  139 

come  across  an  ideal  or  something  that  calls  itself  such, 
cold,  monotonous,  sad,  colorless  under  its  appearance 
of  nobility,  hazy,  stiff,  insipid,  not  brilliant  and  various 
like  marble,  but  white  like  plaster,  not  full  of  warmth 
and  power  as  in  the  flourishing  days  of  Greece  when 
warm  torrents  of  purple  blood  throbbed  through  the 
veins  of  demi-gods  and  heroes,  .  .  .  but  pale,  blood- 
less, ascetic  as  in  Lent,  denying  itself  the  sources  of 
fruitful  inspiration,  living  on  pure  abstractions,  rheu- 
matic from  head  to  foot,  soaked  and  saturated  with 
ennui,  oh,  make  no  mistake,  that  is  the  very  ideal  that 
has  so  long  cast  a  chill  over  the  French  muses,  and 
would  be  capable  of  chilling  them  again,  that  is  the 
ideal  to  avoid." *  In  general  he  attacks  those  who  try 
to  confine  beauty  to  some  one  type  and  produce  ever 
paler  and  paler  copies  of  it.2  To  be  sure  he  would  not 
have  the  writer,  he  says,  display  the  point  of  the  scal- 
pel "  still  dripping  with  blood  and  pus,  but  then  again, 
let  not  thorough-going  anatomy  and  physiology  be  dis- 
regarded and  absent  under  your  folds  and  draperies ; 
let  us  be  conscious  of  genuine  flesh  and  blood  even  un- 
der your  silk  and  lace."3 

Sainte-Beuve's  own  aim,  as  he  says,  was  to  introduce 
into  criticism  a  certain  charm  and  along  with  it  more 
reality  than  had  been  put  into  it  previously,  in  a  word, 
poetry  and  a  certain  amount  of  physiology.4  It  is  easy, 
indeed,  to  discern  the  disjecta  membra  of  the  romantic 
poet  in  his  critical  writing.  He  has  in  particular  a 
strange  knack  for  dissimulating  his  probing  and  dis- 

1  N.  Lundis,  i,  13.     2  Ibid.,  14.      «  Ibid.,  v,  37.     «  Port,  lit.,  m,  &*€. 


140  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

secting  under  the  flowers  of  metaphor.  But  if  he  did 
not  fall  into  the  naturalistic  excess  we  must  ascribe  the 
fact  less  to  his  poetry,  which  is  a  romantic  survival, 
than  to  his  humanistic  tact.  He  shrank  back  instinct- 
ively from  anything  that  was  violent  and  narrow  and 
sectarian ;  and  naturalism  as  held  by  the  men  of  the 
Second  Empire  was  often  all  three.  He  was  placed  in  a 
somewhat  delicate  situation  because  many  of  these  men 
were  his  friends  and  in  part  his  disciples.  But  even  at 
the  risk  of  having  his  motives  misinterpreted  he  spoke 
out.  The  malignant  gossip  of  the  Goncourts  is  due  in 
part  to  the  sheer  inability  of  the  brothers  to  grasp  the 
ideas  that  Taine,  Renan,  Sainte-Beuve,  and  others  ex- 
changed at  the  Magny  dinners,  in  part  to  resentment 
at  the  reservations  Sainte-Beuve  had  made  in  regard  to 
their  own  particular  form  of  naturalism.  He  criticises  in 
a  similar  spirit  Flaubert's  "  Salammbo."  "  Let  us  never 
be  in  literature,"  he  says,  "among  those  who  are  called 
in  this  novel  '  the  eaters  of  unclean  things.'  "  This  over- 
refinement  and  perversion  of  taste  seemed  to  him  to 
mark  the  end  of  a  literary  school.  He  finds  it  impos- 
sible to  belong  to  this  school.  "  I  will  love  you  individ- 
ually," he  says  to  Flaubert  and  his  other  ultra-natural- 
istic friends,  "but  I  shall  never  be  of  your  sect."1  He 
rebelled  especially  against  the  penchant  of  the  sectarian 
naturalists  for  what  has  been  called  aggressive  unpleas- 
antness. "  At  the  risk  of  losing  what  credit  I  may  still 
have  with  many  of  my  contemporaries,"  he  writes,  "  and 
among  them  some  who  are  very  dear  to  me,  I  confess 

1  N.  Lundis,  iv,  91. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  141 

in  matters  of  taste  to  a  great  weakness  :  I  like  what  is 
agreeable."1  His  simple  remark  in  a  letter  to  Zola  that 
the  verb  "  wallow  "  (vautrer) 2  occurs  too  frequently  in 
his  novels  is  worth  pages  of  ordinary  criticism. 

Sainte-Beuve  also  made  a  humanistic  protest  against 
the  dangers  and  excesses  of  scientific  naturalism.  Sci- 
ence is  interested  primarily  not  in  the  man  who  has 
assimilated  the  riches  of  tradition  and  is  harmoniously 
developed  and  wise  in  himself,  but  in  the  man  who  can 
contribute  definitely  to  the  great  cause  of  progress, 
which  means  practically  in  the  specialist,  the  man  who 
has  fixed  with  enthusiasm  and  tenacity  on  some  par- 
ticular field,  at  whatever  risk  of  narrowing  his  horizons. 
Both  the  romantic  and  scientific  sides  of  the  naturalistic 
movement  converge  upon  the  idea  of  originality.  We 
have  already  seen  that  the  dangers  of  this  modern  con- 
ception of  originality  were  visible  to  Sainte-Beuve  in 
Cousin  and  his  school.  "  Let  us  encourage,"  he  says, 
"  all  laborious  investigation,  but  let  us  give  in  every- 
thing the  first  place  to  talent,  meditation,  judgment, 
reason,  taste."  "  It  seems,"  he  complains,  anticipating 
Brunetiere  and  his  "Fureur  de  1'Inedit,"  "that  to  edit 
an  old  book  already  published,  or  to  print  some  insig- 
nificant scrap  for  the  first  time,  is  nowadays  a  more  se- 
rious claim  to  esteem  than  to  have  a  style  and  ideas."' 

None  appeared  to  Sainte-Beuve  (again  anticipating 
Brunetiere)  more  in  need  of  moderating  the  fury  of  their 
research  by  a  knowledge  of  the  humanistic  tradition 
than  the  medievalists.  The  resemblance  between  Sainte- 

»  N.  Lundis,  x,  403.        2  Cor.,  n,  315.         8  N.  Lundis,  v,  372. 


142  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Beuve  and  Goethe  is  here  obvious.  "  True  and  incom- 
parable beauty,"  says  Sainte-Beuve, "  has  shone  forth  in 
its  perfect  exemplars  only  once  or  perhaps  twice  under 
the  sun.  There  are,  to  be  sure,  beauties  of  different  sorts 
and  degrees.  The  manifestations  of  human  life  and  the 
human  spirit  are  infinite.  Let  us  welcome  them  all ;  yet 
let  those  of  us  who  have  seen  or  glimpsed  true  beauty 
never  forget  it.  Let  us  preserve  faithfully  within  us  its 
lofty  and  delicate  image,  if  it  were  only  that  we  might 
not  lavish  its  name  on  every  occasion  and  forever  pro- 
fane it,  as  I  see  being  done  by  estimable  investigators 
who  are  deeply  versed  in  mediaeval  documents  (qui  ont 
beaucoup  paperasse  sur  le  Moy en-Age),  and  who  have 
no  knowledge  of  anything  else." *  "  Many  of  these  medi- 
sevalists,"  he  says  again,  referring  especially  to  Paulin 
Paris,  "do  not  possess  in  themselves  all  the  necessary 
terms  of  comparison." 2  They  fall  into  aberrations  of 
taste  that  "  would  be  impossible  for  any  one  who  has 
read  Sophocles  in  the  original  text." 3 

In  speaking  at  one  moment  as  a  humanist  and  at 
another  as  a  naturalist  Sainte-Beuve  is  not,  I  must  repeat, 
necessarily  inconsistent.  Yet  the  opposition  between  the 
two  sides  of  his  nature,  between  the  scientific  investiga- 
tor, and  the  aesthetic  humanist,  is  at  times  unmistakable. 
To  whom,  for  example  is  the  conflict  between  head  and 
heart  not  palpable  in  a  passage  like  the  following? 
"  Where  is  the  time  when  you  could  read  a  book  even 
though  you  yourself  were  an  author  and  a  professional 
without  so  many  complications.  .  .  .  The  time  when  you 

i  N.  Lundis,  m,  378.  2  Ibid.,  384.  «  Ibid.,  396. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  143 

read  ancients  and  moderns,  reclining  upon  your  couch, 
like  Horace  during  the  dog-days,  or  stretched  out  on 
your  sofa  like  Gray,  saying  to  yourself  that  you  had 
something  better  than  the  joys  of  Paradise  or  Olympus ; 
the  time  when  you  could  read  strolling  around  in  the 
shade,  like  that  respectable  Hollander,  who  said  he  could 
not  imagine  any  greater  happiness  here  below  at  the  age 
of  fifty  than  to  walk  slowly  through  a  fair  countryside, 
book  in  hand,  closing  it  at  intervals  without  desire  or 
passion,  sunk  in  meditation ;  the  time  when  like  the 
'  Reader '  of  Meissonier  in  your  solitary  room  on  a 
Sunday  afternoon  near  the  open  window  overshadowed 
with  honeysuckle,  you  read  a  unique  and  cherished 
book?  What  has  become  of  this  happy  age?  How  very 
different  things  are  to-day  when  you  are  always  on  pin- 
points in 'reading,  and  have  constantly  to  be  on  your 
guard  and  interrogate  yourself  unceasingly,  and  ask 
whether  it  is  the  right  text,  whether  there  is  n't  some 
corruption,  whether  the  author  you  are  enjoying  has  n't 
taken  it  from  somewhere  else,  whether  he  has  copied 
reality  or  invented,  whether  he  is  really  original  and 
how,  whether  he  was  true  to  his  nature,  his  race,  etc. 
.  .  .  and  a  thousand  other  questions  which  spoil  pleas- 
ure, engender  doubt,  make  you  scratch  your  forehead, 
force  you  to  climb  up  to  the  highest  shelves  of  your 
library,  to  pull  about  all  your  books,  to  consult  and 
make  excerpts,  finally  to  become  once  more  a  laborer  and 
a  workman  instead  of  a  voluptuary  and  delicate  amateur 
who  was  breathing  the  spirit  of  things  and  taking  of  them 
only  what  he  needed  for  his  pleasure  and  delight.  Epi- 


144  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

cureanism  o£  taste,  forever  lost  I  fear ;  henceforth  impos- 
sible at  least  for  all  critics ;  last  religion  even  of  those 
who  had  no  other ;  last  honor  and  virtue  of  a  Hamilton 
and  a  Petronius,  how  I  understand  and  regret  you  in  the 
very  act  of  opposing  and  abjuring  you! " l 

The  various  virtues  of  the  critic,  including  the  rich- 
ness and  depth  of  literary  sensibility  that  appear  in 
this  passage,  are  so  happily  mingled  in  Sainte-Beuve 
that  no  one,  I  presume,  would  wish  him  different.  Yet 
the  passage  also  makes  plain  why  he  has  been  influential 
as  a  naturalist  rather  than  as  a  humanist  —  quite  apart 
from  the  fact  that  in  his  naturalism  he  fell  in  with  the 
main  current  of  his  time.  A  humanism  that  hopes  to 
act  upon  the  world  cannot  afford  to  recline  even  with 
Horace  and  Gray.  It  must  take  hold  on  the  character 
and  will  and  not  be  simply  epicurean.  If  humanism  is 
merely  an  epicureanism  of  taste  it  is  not  only  sure  to  be 
lost  but  the  loss  will  not  be  altogether  irreparable.  Sainte- 
Beuve  was  very  much  preoccupied  with  the  quarrel  of 
ancients  and  moderns.  His  belief  as  to  the  final  outcome 
may  be  inferred  from  the  following :  "  Sooner  or  later 
I  fear,  the  ancients  with  Homer  at  their  head  will  lose 
the  battle,  or  at  least  half  the  battle.  Let  us  endeavor  for 
the  honor  of  the  flag,  we  who  are  defending  the  retreat, 
that  it  may  be  as  late  as  possible,  and  that  innovation  in 
literature,  that  innovation  in  part  so  legitimate,  may 
nevertheless  not  put  tradition  utterly  to  rout." : 

1  N.  Lundis,  ix,  86-87.  2  Ibid.,  v,  323. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  145 

ni 

In  spite  of  this  flourish  of  military  metaphor  we  are 
not  to  look  here  for  the  militant  side  of  Sainte-Beuve. 
He  put  forth  a  man's  effort,  only  it  was  in  the  service  of 
naturalism.  "  I  have  but  one  pleasure  left,"  he  writes, 
"  I  analyze,  botanize ;  I  am  a  naturalist  of  minds.  What 
I  should  like  to  establish  is  the  natural  history  of  litera- 
ture." l  The  method  that  Sainte-Beuve  here  outlines,  so 
far  from  being  humanistic,  is  in  many  respects  antagon- 
istic to  humanism.  In  order  to  make  this  clear  we  shall 
need  to  study  his  method  in  some  detail,  especially  as 
set  forth  in  the  second  article  on  Chateaubriand  in  the 
third  volume  of  the  "Nouveaux  Lundis."  He  wrote 
the  article  partly  in  reply  to  the  question  that  had  been 
raised  whether  he  had  any  method.  He  justified  the 
somewhat  uncoordinated  aspect  of  his  essays  by  saying 
that  he  was  simply  preparing  sound  monographs  for 
some  future  generalizer.  The  science  of  criticism  in  his 
hands  is  in  the  same  state  as  botany  before  Jussieu  or 
comparative  anatomy  before  Cuvier :  but  on  the  basis 
of  all  this  detailed  observation  it  may  be  possible  to 
discover  some  day  the  great  natural  divisions  corre- 
sponding to  the  families  of  minds.  "  These  true  and  na- 
tural families  of  minds  are  not  so  numerous.  ...  It  is 
just  as  in  botany  for  plants,  in  zoology  for  the  animal 
species.  .  .  .  One  individual  carefully  observed  is  referred 
quickly  to  the  species  of  which  you  knew  only  in  a 
general  way,  and  throws  light  on  it." 2 

1  Port,  lit.,  m,  546.  «  Port-Royal,  i,  65. 


146  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

One  is  inevitably  led  at  this  point  to  apply  Sainte- 
Beuve's  method  to  himself  and  ask  what  was  the  attitude 
of  the  primitive  Sainte-Beuve  towards  this  whole  ques- 
tion, or  at  any  rate  of  Sainte-Beuve  before  that  moment 
in  the  century  when  any  one  who  wished  to  be  taken 
seriously  had  to  make  his  peace  with  Science. 

The  phrase  I  have  just  quoted,  "One  individual  care- 
fully observed,"  puts  us  on  the  right  track  to  the  answer. 
Sainte-Beuve  is  interested  before  everything  else  in  the 
living  individual.  A  marvellous  psychological  finesse  in 
seizing  and  rendering  the  living  individual  —  this  I  be- 
lieve to  have  been  his  primordial  gift.  Behind  the  book 
he  sees  the  man  and  in  the  man  himself  what  is  most 
vital,  personal,  characteristic,  in  a  word,  expressive.  He 
would  lay  siege  to  his  ultimate  idiosyncrasy.  He  is  an 
incomparable  literary  portrait-painter,  or  it  might  be 
more  correct  to  say,  in  view  of  the  infinite  multiplication 
of  fine  strokes,  a  literary  miniaturist.  The  best  way  to 
"  judge  and  penetrate  writers  is  to  listen  to  them  long 
and  carefully ;  just  let  them  unfold  themselves  freely, 
without  hurrying  them,  they  will  tell  you  everything 
about  themselves,  they  will  come  and  paint  their  images 
upon  your  mind." l  (This  passage  also  makes  clear 
why  Sainte-Beuve  has  been  called  a  lay  confessor.) 
When  a  writer  has  thus  posed  before  you  for  a  certain 
time,  says  Sainte-Beuve,  there  is  mingled  little  by  little 
with  the  vague  abstract  and  general  type  which  the  first 
glance  had  taken  in,  an  individual  reality ;  and  "  when 
at  last  you  seize  the  familiar  trick,  the  telltale  smile, 

1  Chateaubriand,  l,  161. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  147 

the  indefinable  wrinkle,  the  secret  line  of  pain  that  is  hid- 
den in  vain  under  the  already  scanty  hair,  at  that  mo- 
ment analysis  disappears  in  creation,  the  portrait  speaks 
and  lives,  you  have  found  the  man."  l  Saiute-Beuve  was 
only  twenty-seven  when  he  wrote  these  lines.  Indeed 
some  of  the  contortion  of  his  earlier  manner  is  to  be 
ascribed  to  this  almost  desperate  pursuit  of  the  final 
degree  of  expressiveness.  "I  confess,"  he  says,  "that 
in  my  efforts  to  get  a  true  likeness,  to  render  the  finer 
shadings  of  every  physiognomy,  I  may  at  times  have 
been  far-fetched  and  over  subtle." 2  In  thus  making  ex- 
pressiveness his  aim  he  realized  that  he  was  embarking 
in  a  sense  on  an  impossible  quest.  "  Can  you  ever  flatter 
yourself  that  you  know  a  soul?"  —  "  the  inexpressible 
monad,"  as  he  calls  it  elsewhere.  When  you  seem  to  have 
reached  something  final  it  turns  out  to  be  expressive  of 
something  still  more  remote.  Human  nature  is  an  end- 
less series  of  false  bottoms. 

In  this  striving  for  the  expressive,  Sainte-Beuve  is  at 
the  very  heart  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Beauty  of 
form  seemed  to  him  the  prerogative  of  the  ancients.  In- 
terest, curiosity,  the  faithful  and  various  rendering  of 
everything  that  goes  on  under  our  eyes  without  any 
preoccupation  with  the  ideal,3  he  looked  upon  as  be- 
longing rather  to  the  moderns.  He  is  not  interested, 
however,  primarily  in  expressiveness  on  the  larger  scale 
—  in  literature,  for  example,  as  an  expression  of  society. 
He  always  keeps  as  close  as  possible  to  the  individual. 
Unlike  Taine,  he  loves  to  particularize  rather  than  to 

i  Port,  lit.,  i,  239.         *  Port,  con*.,  i,  274.         »  N.  Lundis,  m,  409. 


148  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

generalize,  to  deal  with  men  singly  rather  than  in 
"  zones  or  layers,"  to  feel  life  in  its  infinite  complexity 
rather  than  impose  upon  it  logical  formulae.  He  says 
that  he  is  "  habituated  and  inclined  by  nature  to  study 
especially  individuals." 1  He  takes  a  group  like  that  of 
the  Jansenists  in  the  seventeenth  century  who  at  this 
distance  are  lost  in  a  gray  uniformity,  and  multiplies 
his  fine  shadings  and  delicate  discriminations,  until  each 
figure  of  the  group  stands  out  distinctly.  "  To  particu- 
larize Nicole,"  he  says,  "is  the  greatest  service  one  can 
render  him."2  A  greater  particularizer  in  this  sense 
than  Sainte-Beuve  never  lived.  When  he  has  finished 
with  M.  de  Saci  he  is  justified  in  saying  that  we  have 
got  so  close  to  him  that  we  seem  almost  to  hear  him 
chatting.3  Du  Guet,  again,  "  has  his  nuance  which  dis- 
tinguishes him  from  M.  Singlin,  from  M.  de  Saci."4 
On  reading  all  these  particulars,  he  says,  "  you  feel  as  if 
you  yourself  belonged  to  this  same  society."  5 

An  enormous  knowledge  of  the  facts,  a  marvellous  psy- 
chological finesse  and  in  addition  a  sort  of  divination,  are 
needed  thus  to  reanimate  the  past.  In  Sainte-Beuve,  if  any- 
where, is  found  the  triumph  of  that  historical  second- 
sight  on  which  the  nineteenth  century  prided  itself. 
Sainte-Beuve  was  aided  in  his  art  of  mediating  between 
the  past  and  the  present  by  the  "  moment " :  he  lived 
at  a  time  when  it  was  still  possible  to  receive  a  living 
initiation  into  tradition,  that  is  to  say,  to  see  the  past 
as  it  saw  itself,  which  means  in  practice  to  live  in  a 

i  N.  Lundis,  ix,  180.  2  Port-Royal,  iv,  411.  8  Ibid. 

4  Port-Royal,  v,  132.  •  Ibid.,  512. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  149 

world  of  absolute  values ;  it  was  already  possible,  on 
the  other  hand,  to  detach  one's  self  from  the  past  and  to 
see  it  relatively  and  phenomenally.  This  art  of  medi- 
ating between  the  past  and  the  present  is  becoming 
more  difficult  for  us  to-day.  We  tend  to  see  the  past 
only  relatively;  this  relativism  is  further  complicated 
by  the  dogma  of  Progress.  This  dogma  is  so  successful 
in  putting  blinders  on  the  human  spirit  not  only  be- 
cause it  is  a  dogma,  but  a  dogma  founded  upon  the 
flux.  For  example,  the  writer  of  a  recent  book  hurries 
through  the  palace  of  Versailles  and  decides  that  peo- 
ple who  had  such  a  defective  system  of  plumbing  and 
sanitation  could  hardly  have  been  worth  while.  He  evi- 
dently had  no  sense  for  the  greatness  man  may  attain 
with  a  system  of  plumbing  different  from  his  own,  or 
indeed  without  any  plumbing  at  all. 

Let  us  repeat  that  Sainte-Beuve's  own  hold  on  tra- 
dition and  the  sense  of  unity  that  goes  with  it  was 
mainly  aesthetic,  and  therefore  comparatively  ineffect- 
ive. He  had  no  intuition  of  unity  and  was  rightly  skep- 
tical of  any  attempt  to  impose  a  mere  logical  unity  upon 
the  facts,  and  so  was  left  without  adequate  counterpoise 
to  his  perception  of  the  Many.  Everything,  including 
literary  reputation,  seemed  to  him  subject  to  the  same 
instability.  He  took  as  motto  for  his  "  Portraits  Contem- 
porains  "  the  sentence  of  Senac  de  Meilhan :  "  We  are 
mobile  and  judge  mobile  beings."  "Every  day  I 
change,"  he  writes :  "  the  years  follow  the  years ;  my 
tastes  of  a  former  season  are  no  longer  my  tastes  of  to- 
day ;  my  friendships  themselves  wither  up  and  are  re- 


150  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

newed.  Before  the  final  death  of  the  mobile  being  that 
bears  my  name,  how  many  men  have  already  died  within 
me !  — You  think  that  I  am  speaking  of  myself  personally, 
reader :  but  reflect  a  moment  and  see  if  the  same  is  not 
true  of  you."1  He  sees  everything  gradually  growing 
out  of  everything  else  and  notes  the  almost  impercept- 
ible differences  that  mark  the  transition  from  one  stage 
to  another  of  this  growth.  Man,  according  to  Emerson, 
is  a  bundle  of  roots,  and  a  knot  of  relations.  No  one 
ever  surpassed  Sainte-Beuve  in  following  out  the  finest 
filaments  of  these  relationships.  However  ineffective  he 
may  have  been  as  a  humanist,  as  a  relativist  he  has  been 
enormously  influential.  He  has  indeed  been  correctly 
defined  in  his  influence  as  a  great  doctor  of  relativity. 
M.  France,  for  example,  writes  of  M.  Lemaitre,  "  He  has 
even  more  than  Sainte-Beuve,  from  whom  we  are  all 
sprung,  the  sense  of  the  relative."  2 

It  should  appear  from  the  foregoing  in  what  sense 
Sainte-Beuve  was  from  the  outset  and  instinctively  a 
naturaliste  des  esprits.  His  later  endeavor  in  obedience 
to  the  spirit  of  the  age  to  organize  this  instinctive 
naturalism  into  a  definite  method  led  him  to  the  verge 
of  pseudo-science;  but  even  here  he  is  usually  saved  at 
the  last  moment  by  his  native  tact  and  prudence  from 
taking  the  final  step  and  looking  on  the  living  individ- 
ual, especially  the  superior  individual,  as  a  mere  link  in 
the  chain  of  phenomena ;  just  as  in  "  Port-Royal "  there 
is  a  point  where  he  pauses  and  refuses  to  apply  his  nat- 
uralistic dissection  to  the  ultimate  raptures  of  religion. 

1  Port,  lit.,  in,  544.  a  Vie  lit.,  I,  9. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  151 

"  Doubtless,"  he  says,  "  you  will  never  be  able  to  proceed 
for  man  exactly  as  for  animals  and  plants.  .  .  .  He  has 
what  is  called  liberty"  l  Of  some  of  his  utterances 
one  would  be  inclined  to  say,  that  though  not  pseudo- 
scientific  in  themselves,  they  encourage  others  to  pseudo- 
science. 

IV 

But  before  discussing  this  point  further  let  us  take 
up  in  detail  certain  features  of  Saint-Betive's  method, 
illustrating  his  theory  so  far  as  possible  from  his  actual 
practice.  The  first  connection  he  establishes  in  his  net- 
work of  relativity  is  that  between  a  work  and  its  author ; 
between  the  author  in  turn  and  his  family,  race,  and  age; 
and  then  between  the  age  and  the  preceding  age,  and  so 
on  in  widening  circles.  In  thus  seeking  to  account  for  a 
literary  product  in  terms  of  natural  causes,  he  keeps  as 
close  as  possible,  as  I  have  said,  to  the  specific  and  im- 
mediate, and  is  comparatively  unconcerned  with  those 
more  general  causes,  race  and  climate  and  the  like,  that 
are  made  so  much  of  by  Taine.  He  does  not  deny  the 
importance  of  the  racial  factor,  but  says  that  this  deep 
root  is  usually  concealed.  He  admits  that  sooner  or  later 
the  theory  of  climate  and  environment  imposes  itself. 
"As  is  the  scene  so  are  the  actors.  The  ancients  had 
the  broad  general  perception  of  this  relationship :  it  is 
for  the  moderns  to  work  out  the  precise  and  detailed 
proof."  2  He  protests,  however,  that  this  bond  between 
localities  and  their  inhabitants  is  being  forced  and  exag- 
gerated even  to  the  breaking  point.3 
i  IT.  Lundis,  ni,  17.  *  Ibid.,  ix,  323.  »  Ibid.,  xin,  218. 


152  MODEEN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

He  is  more  at  home  in  tracing  the  way  in  which  one  age 
is  related  to  the  previous  age  and  grows  inevitably  out  of 
it,  inasmuch  as  this  relationship  is  more  literary  and  more 
readily  studied  in  terms  of  the  individual.  He  discovers, 
for  example,  in  the  fine  and  ingenious,  but  somewhat 
manneristic  turn  of  Du  Guet's  style  something  that 
smacks  already  of  the  eighteenth  century.1  "  We  have 
learned  how  to  distinguish,"  he  says,  "wherein  the  style 
of  the  first  period  of  Louis  XIV  differs  from  the  aver- 
age style  of  the  middle  of  the  reign,  and  wherein  this 
reign  at  its  end  has  already  its  manner  bordering  on  that 
of  the  eighteenth  century.  Pascal,  Retz,  and  La  Roche- 
foucauld do  not  write  like  La  Bruyere,  and  the  exquisite 
and  just  language  that  Madame  de  Maintenon  in  her 
old  age  teaches  to  the  Due  du  Maine  is  not  to  be  con- 
fused with  any  other  nuance  in  the  language  of  the  same 
time."  2 

In  virtue  of  the  same  historical  sense,  you  come  to 
perceive  how  the  age  of  Louis  XIV  itself  developed 
from  the  preceding  age.  You  come  to  feel  that  the  age 
of  Louis  XIV  was  not  an  accident  (  ...  as  an  ac- 
quaintance of  mine  once  said)  but  rather  the  result  and 
natural  fruit  of  a  continuous  culture  and  development.3 
In  the  same  way  you  come  to  feel  that  the  great 
writer  is  no  more  an  accident  than  the  great  age. 
"  After  men  like  Saint-Cyran  and  Le  Maitre  and  Saci, 
when  we  come  to  Pascal  we  are  ready  to  see  more 
clearly  the  proportions;  ...  to  measure  the  glorious 
side  of  genius,  without  granting  more  than  neces- 

i  Port-Royal,  VI,  21.         «  lundis,  v,  173.         8  N.  Lundis,  vi,  364. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  153 

sary  to  this  glory.  .  .  .  In  a  word,  we  are  well  and  duly 
prepared." 

Almost  any  subject  when  thus  studied  relatively,  that 
is,  as  the  outgrowth  of  something  else,  ramifies  in  every 
direction.  "If  you  live  in  a  subject  a  short  time,"  he 
says,  "  you  are,  as  it  were,  in  a  city  filled  with  friends. 
You  can  scarcely  take  a  step  in  the  main  street  without 
being  instantly  accosted  right  and  left  and  invited  to 
enter." 2  "  Port-Royal "  thus  became  not  simply  a  history 
of  Jansenism,  but  in  at  least  an  equal  degree  a  history 
of  French  literature  and  society  in  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury. In  Sainte-Beuve's  own  phrase,  it  is  simply  a 
method  for  "  traversing  the  epoch." 3 

If  Sainte-Beuve  likes  to  trace  by  individual  examples 
the  process  by  which  one  age  passes  over  into  another, 
by  which  as  he  would  say  the  spiritual  climate  (le  climat 
des  espirits]  changes,  he  gets  still  closer  to  biography,  and 
is  therefore  still  more  at  home,  in  studying  the  relation- 
ship between  the  individual  and  his  epoch.  The  old  criti- 
cism, as  he  says,  was  especially  weak  in  this  respect;  for 
example,  the  defective  historical  sense  of  La  Harpe  ap- 
pears in  the  fact  that  he  tries  to  represent  the  creative 
genius  of  Corneille  as  independent  of  circumstances.4 
Sainte-Beuve  insists  for  his  part  that  it  was  possible  for 
Corneille  to  create  "  Polyeucte  "  only  because  there  was 
"  something  about  him  (whether  he  knew  it  or  not)  that 
equalled  and  reproduced  the  same  miracles."5  Racine 
again  put  into  his  work  all  the  poetry  properly  so-called 
that  the  polite  society  of  the  time  could  receive.6  Of 

i  Port-Royal,  H,  376.  *  Ibid.,  I,  412.  *  Ibid.,  I,  146. 

*  Ibid.,  I,  119.  «  Ibid.,  1, 115.  •  Ibid.,  vi,  128. 


154  MODERN  FKENCH  CRITICISM 

Balzac  he  says  that  his  feeling  for  unity  and  the  things 
of  the  spirit  marked  him  a  contemporary  of  Richelieu.1 
Saint-Evremond,  "  the  firm-souled  epicurean,"  acquired 
his  insight  into  great  historical  characters  as  a  result 
of  his  own  experiences  in  the  Fronde.2  "  That  powerful 
spirit,"  he  says  of  Arnauld,  "  remained  more  than  half 
plunged  in  the  general  prejudices  and  zones  of  illusion 
prevailing  in  his  time;  his  horizons  were  bounded  on 
every  hand." 3  The  work  even  of  so  great  an  innovator  as 
Chateaubriand  is  conditioned  in  the  same  way.  Sainte- 
Beuve  points  out  the  analogy  between  the  death  of  Atala 
and  a  group  in  marble  by  Canova.4 

It  is,  however,  with  what  we  may  term  the  purely 
biographical  relationships  that  we  reach  the  heart  of 
Sainte-Beuve's  method.  First  of  all  there  is  the  connec- 
tion between  the  book  and  its  author.  In  what  M.  Guizot 
offers  him,  he  says,  as  a  general  solution  of  the  problem 
of  life,  — a  philosophy  and  theology,  —  he  sees  a  distinct 
and  special  type  of  man  determined  by  his  temperament 
and  past.5  Since  the  work  is  thus  expressive  of  the  man, 
the  important  point  is  to  know  the  man;  and  to  know 
a  man,  in  other  words  something  else  than  a  pure  spirit, 
we  cannot  go  to  work  in  too  many  different  ways.  We  must 
approach  him  in  the  first  place  from  the  point  of  view  of 
heredity,  we  must  strive  to  discover  what  he  owes  to  his 
ancestry  and  his  parents,  above  all  to  his  mother  (great 
men  nearly  always  have  distinguished  mothers),  and  how 

1  Port-Royal,  i,  115. 

8  N.  Lundis,  in,  227.   Saint-Evremond  is  another  of  the  seventeenth- 
century  "  libertines  "  with  whom  Sainte-Beuve  felt  an  inner  kinship. 
•  Port-Royal,  v,  313.    *  Chateaubriand,  i,  257.     8  N.  Lundis,  ix,  109. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  155 

he  resembles  his  sisters  (the  sister  of  the  great  man  some- 
times has  a  distinction  superior  to  that  of  the  great  man 
himself) ;  finally  we  must  study  him  in  his  brothers  and 
children.  Nature  frequently  does  the  analyzing  for  us 
and  traits  are  often  easier  to  seize  as  they  appear  thus 
separately  in  them  than  when  blended  in  the  eminent 
person  himself.1 

We  can  thus  follow  Sainte-Beuve  as  he  weaves  about 
the  individual  the  meshes  of  the  new  fatality.  For  ne- 
cessity, as  Pater  remarks,  "  has  ceased  to  be  for  the 
moderns  a  sort  of  mythological  personage  without  us, 
with  whom  we  can  do  warfare  :  it  is  a  magic  web  woven 
through  and  through  us,  like  that  magnetic  system  of 
which  modern  science  speaks,  penetrating  us  with  a 
network  subtler  than  our  subtlest  nerves,  yet  bearing 
in  it  the  central  forces  of  the  world."  Not  only  does  a 
man's  work  reflect  his  temperament,  but  this  tempera- 
mental self  is  constantly  changing.  We  must  learn  to 
see  these  successive  and  fatal  transformations  of  the  in- 
dividual from  youth  to  old  age,  and  their  relationship  to 
his  work,  and  for  this  another  world  of  nuances  is  needed. 
I  have  already  noted  Sainte-Beuve's  predilection  for  the 
first  flush  of  youth,  and  that  this  is  the  form  the  cult 
of  the  primitive  assumes  in  him.  Man  is  most  fully  in 
possession  of  his  faculties  at  the  age  of  thirty-five. 
And  then  as  we  follow  still  further  the  fatal  curve  we 
come  to  the  moment  of  decline  when  the  very  excess  of 
the  virtue  becomes  a  fault,  when  some  writers  grow 
rigid  and  dry  and  wither,  and  others  let  themselves  go, 

1  N.  Lundis,  ni,  18  ff. 


156  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

when  still  others  harden  or  become  heavy,  and  when 
some  grow  sour ;  when  the  smile  becomes  a  wrinkle.1 
The  painter,  Horace  Vernet,  has  Sainte-Beuve's  ap- 
proval because  he  went  through  all  the  stages  of  a 
noble  career :  "  Like  all  complete  organizations  he  had 
in  succession  the  fruits  of  each  season.  The  moment  of 
his  greatest  merit  coincides  with  the  hour  of  his  maturity 
and  his  old  age  did  not  lack  serious  thoughts." 2  "  There 
comes  an  inevitable  hour  when  everything  grows  dark 
within  us  and  about  us.  Long  before  the  arrival  of  this 
moment  and  in  the  midst  of  our  last  spells  of  sunshine, 
a  sudden  presentiment  heralds  it  at  times  and  the  gay- 
est, the  most  prone  to  laughter,  find  themselves  growing 
pensive." 3  Evidently  a  successful  attempt  to  maintain 
one's  faculties  and  spirits  at  their  best  level  in  old  age 
would  have  seemed  to  Sainte-Beuve  a  sort  of  affront  to 
the  Goddess  Natura. 

We  must,  however,  deal  with  a  man  in  a  still  more 
intimate  and  personal  way.  We  must  ask  ourselves 
questions  that  at  first  sight  seem  most  foreign  to  the 
nature  of  his  writings.  For  example,  "  What  were  his 
religious  opinions?  How  was  he  affected  by  the  spec- 
tacle of  nature?  How  did  he  behave  in  the  matter  of 
women?  in  the  matter  of  money?  Was  he  rich  or  poor? 
What  was  his  hygiene  and  daily  mode  of  life  ?  Finally, 
what  was  his  vice  or  weakness?  Every  man  has  one."4 
This  theory  of  the  essential  vice,  we  may  note  in  pass- 
ing, Sainte-Beuve  probably  took  from  La  Rochefou- 

1  N.  Lundis,  m,  26-27.  a  Ibid.,  v,  62. 

»  Ibid.,  122.  *  Ibid.,  in,  28. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  157 

cauld.1  It  was  also  an  important  part  of  Sainte-Beuve's 
method  to  get  at  the  fault  of  the  master  by  studying 
its  exaggeration  in  the  disciples.  He  is  ready  to  carry 
even  to  the  foot  of  the  altar  and  beyond  what  he  calls 
his  "intimate  perscrutation  of  talents."2  "When  you 
have  to  do  with  a  woman,"  he  says,  "  even  with  a  model 
of  saintliness,  two  or  three  inevitable  questions  present 
themselves  :  Was  she  pretty?  Did  she  ever  fall  in  love? 
What  was  the  determining  motive  of  her  conversion?"3 
The  perils  of  the  pursuit  of  la  verite  vraie  when 
pushed  to  this  point  are  manifest.  The  "  grand  "  curi- 
osity (la  grande  curiosite),  in  the  name  of  which  Sainte- 
Beuve  would  pursue  his  inquiries,  may  very  easily  de- 
generate into  curiosity  of  the  petty  and  even  the  prurient 
type.  "  I  have  observed,"  says  Addison  ironically,  "  that 
a  reader  seldom  peruses  a  book  with  pleasure  until  he 
knows  whether  the  writer  of  it  be  a  black  or  fair  man," 
etc.  This  universal  human  instinct  flourished  as  never 
before  in  the  nineteenth  century,  when  instead  of 
having  any  check  put  upon  it,  it  received  a  sort  of 
scientific  sanction.  "  Our  century,"  says  Sainte-Beuve, 
"  loves  these  intimate  details.  It  never  can  get  too  many 
of  them."4  Yet  it  has  been  said  that  when  a  man  falls 
into  his  anecdotage  it  is  all  over  with  him,  and  the 
same  may  be  true  of  criticism.  We  can  follow  Sainte- 
Beuve's  own  method  here  and  study  the  master's  fault 
as  exaggerated  in  the  disciples.  Critics  less  discreet  and 

1  "  H  n'y  a  guere  de  personnes  qui  dans  le  premier  penchant  de  1'age 
ne  fassent  connaitre  par  oil  leur  corps  etleur  esprit  doivent  de'faillir." 
*  N.  Limdis,  vi,  419.  «  Ibid.,  i,  213.  *  Ibid.,  xn,  215. 


158  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

tactful  than  he  have  indulged  in  a  veritable  orgy  of 
biographical  and  autobiographical  indiscretions.  Under 
pretext  of  explaining  the  author's  work  all  the  decencies 
of  his  private  life  have  been  violated;  in  Peacock's 
phrase,  "  he  has  been  dished  up  like  a  savory  omelette  to 
gratify  the  appetite  of  the  reading  rabble  for  gossip." 

Sainte-Beuve  has  spoken  with  fitting  contempt  of  the 
more  trivial  forms  of  curiosity,  but  he  cannot  himself 
be  held  to  have  been  entirely  free  from  them.  Are  we 
helped  for  instance,  in  judging  the  writing  of  Charles 
Magnin  by  a  knowledge  of  the  fact  that  every  evening 
about  nine  he  used  to  see  his  grandmother  safely  to 
bed?1  Is  much  light  thrown  on  Nicole's  spiritual  nature 
by  knowing  how  often  he  shaved  or  that  his  wig  was 
frequently  on  awry?2  Nicole  would  have  a  right  to  ex- 
claim with  the  Reverend  Dr.  Folliott,  "  What  business 
have  the  public  with  my  nose  and  wig  ?  "  Sainte-Beuve 
is  not  above  commenting  on  Michaud's  finger  nails  (il 
les  avaitfortnoirs,les  ongles\z  and  used  occasionally, 
we  are  told,  to  invite  in  to  dinner  the  cook  of  Dr.  Veron 
so  that  he  might  gossip  with  her  about  the  great  per- 
sonages of  the  Second  Empire.4 

Unless  we  go  into  details  of  this  kind,  Sainte-Beuve 
would  tell  us,  we  are  likely  to  have  some  Olympian  simu- 
lacrum palmed  off  on  us  as  the  actual  person.  He  would 
have  us  perfect  ourselves  in  what,  according  to  Chamfort, 
is  the  greatest  of  all  arts,  the  art  of  not  being  taken  in. 
Strange  things,  for  example,  went  on  under  the  smooth 

1  N.  Lundis,  v,  456.  •  Port-Royal,  iv,  698. 

«  Lundis,  xi,  486.  «  See  Nouvelle  Cor.,  226. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  159 

surface  of  the  somewhat  Jesuitical  decorum  of  the  sev- 
enteenth century.  Where  should  we  be  if  we  had 
not  a  Saint-Simon  to  warn  us  against  this  false  nobility 
and  under  the  solemn  and  conventional  poses  to  show 
us  the  real  man?1  Sainte-Beuve  often  reminds  one  of 
Thackeray,  especially  in  this  instinct  for  uncovering 
shams.  "  Queen  Anne,"  says  Thackeray,  "  was  only  a 
hot  red-faced  woman  not  in  the  least  resembling  that 
statue  of  her  which  turns  its  stone  back  on  Saint  Paul's," 
etc.  Louis  XIV,  again,  "  was  a  hero  for  a  book  if  you 
like,  or  for  a  brass  statue  or  a  painted  ceiling  —  a  god 
in  Roman  shape,  but  what  more  than  a  man  for  Madame 
de  Maintenon,  or  the  barber  who  shaved  him  or  Monsieur 
Fagon,  his  surgeon  ?"  If  we  are  to  get  at  the  real  man, 
we  must,  it  would  seem,  see  him  through  the  eyes  of  his 
barber,  or  his  surgeon,  or  possibly  his  cook.  It  has  been 
said  of  Sainte-Beuve  as  of  Voltaire  that  he  had  a  grudge 
against  all  pedestals.  He  would  do  for  his  time  what 
Saint-Simon  did  for  his  and  put  posterity  on  its  guard. 
He  excels  in  what  one  may  term  the  disenchanting  anec- 
dote. He  relates,  for  example,  how  one  day  he  was  with 
Chateaubriand  at  Madame  Re'camier's  when  Lamartine 
came  in.  "Jocelyn"  had  just  appeared  and  Madame 
Recamier  began  to  praise  the  book  eagerly  to  Lamartine, 
who  entered  with  naive  fatuity  into  this  praise  of  him- 
self. But  Chateaubriand  when  called  upon  by  Madame 
Recamier  to  bear  witness  also,  did  not  utter  a  word ;  he 
simply  took  his  scarf  and  held  it  between  his  teeth  accord- 
ing to  his  wont  when  determined  not  to  speak.  Scarcely, 

»  N.  Lundit,  x,  268. 


160  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

however,  had  Lamartine  left  the  room  when  Chateau- 
briand burst  out  all  at  once,  as  if  he  were  alone,  and  ex- 
claimed, "  The  great  ninny !  "  (le  grand  dadais).  "  I 
was  there,"  adds  Sainte-Beuve,  "and I  heard  it." 1  After 
a  few  anecdotes  of  this  kind  we  are  in  no  danger  of  seeing 
either  Chateaubriand  or  Lamartine  on  pedestals. 


Any  process  of  idealization  not  only  seemed  to  Sainte- 
Beuve  unreal  in  itself,  but  it  interfered  with  the  virtue, 
that,  as  I  have  already  said,  he  was  chiefly  seeking  in 
common  with  his  century  —  expressiveness.  However 
far  he  fell  short  of  the  antique  symmetry,  he  could  at 
least  render  life  in  all  its  infinite  variety,  and  did  so  with 
extraordinary  success.  No  writer  is  more  vital.  He  is  at 
once  the  best  read  and  the  least  bookish  of  critics.  The 
actual  men  of  the  past  rise  before  us,  not  precisely  in 
their  habits  as  they  lived,  but,  what  is  more  to  the 
purpose,  each  in  his  inner  psychological  truth.  To 
read  Sainte-Beuve  is  to  enlarge  one's  knowledge,  not 
merely  of  literature  but  of  life.  Indeed,  the  somewhat 
paradoxical  charge  may  be  brought  against  his  criti- 
cism that  it  is  not  sufficiently  literary.  He  says  of 
himself,  it  is  true,  that  he  was  one  of  those  who  had 
the  religion  of  letters,  and  so  indeed  he  had  —  in  about 
the  sense,  to  quote  his  own  phrase,  that  a  Hamilton  or 
a  Petronius  had  it.  I  do  not  believe  that  the  religion  of 
letters,  or  even  a  sound  defence  of  literary  tradition,  is, 
in  the  long  run,  compatible  with  Sainte-Beuve's  philo- 
1  Chateaubriand,  n,  389-90. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  161 

sophy  of  life.  His  own  performance  we  must  repeat  is 
unique.  But  we  have  a  right  to  judge  it  not  only  in 
itself,  but  in  its  tendency  and  influence,  in  its  relation 
to  the  laws  of  its  genre.  Now  thus  considered  criticism 
in  Sainte-Beuve  is  plainly  moving  away  from  its  own 
centre  towards  something  else ;  it  is  ceasing  to  be  literary 
and  becoming  historical  and  biographical  and  scientific. 
It  illustrates  strikingly  in  its  own  fashion  the  drift  of 
the  nineteenth  century  away  from  the  pure  type,  the 
genre  tranche,  towards  a  general  mingling  and  confusion 
of  the  genres.  We  are  scarcely  conscious  of  any  change 
when  Sainte-Beuve  passes,  as  he  does  especially  in  the 
later  volumes  of  the  "Nouveaux  Lundis,"  from  writers 
to  generals  or  statesmen. 

Yet  history  and  biography  and  science  are  at  best 
preparations  for  literary  criticism,  preparations  that  are 
always  relevant  to  be  sure,  but  likely  to  be  less  relevant 
in  direct  ratio  to  the  distinction  of  the  man  who  is  being 
criticized.  The  greater  the  man,  for  example,  the  more 
baffling  he  is  likely  to  be  to  students  of  heredity.  The 
higher  forms  of  human  excellence,  says  Dante,  are  rarely 
subject  to  heredity;  and  this  God  wills  in  order  that  we 
may  know  that  they  come  from  him  alone.  The  truth 
Dante  thus  puts  theologically  is,  I  believe,  a  matter  of 
observation  so  far  as  the  past  is  concerned.  As  for  the 
future  it  is  not  yet  clear  that  our  schemes  of  eugenics 
are  going  to  outwit  God.  The  genius  of  Keats  is  pre- 
cisely that  part  of  him  that  cannot  be  explained  by 
the  fact  that  he  was  the  son  of  the  keeper  of  a  London 
livery  stable.  In  this  sense  we  may  say  with  Emerson 


162  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

that  "great  geniuses  have  the  shortest  biographies." 
"Can  any  biography,"  he  says,  "shed  light  on  the 
localities  into  which  the  t  Midsummer  Night's  Dream ' 
admits  me?  Did  Shakespeare  confide  to  any  notary 
or  parish  recorder,  sacristan,  or  surrogate,  in  Stratford, 
the  genesis  of  that  delicate  creation?  The  forest  of 
Arden,  the  nimble  air  of  Scone  Castle,  the  moonlight 
of  Portia's  villa,  'the  antres  vast  and  desarts  idle'  of 
Othello's  captivity, — where  is  the  third  cousin,  or  grand- 
nephew,  the  chancellor's  file  of  accounts,  or  private  let- 
ter, that  has  kept  one  word  of  those  transcendent  secrets  ? 
In  fine,  in  this  drama,  as  in  all  great  works  of  art  .  .  . 
the  Genius  draws  up  the  ladder  after  him,  when  the  cre- 
ative age  goes  up  to  heaven,  and  gives  way  to  a  new  age, 
which  sees  the  works  and  asks  in  vain  for  a  history." 

Sainte-Beuve  was  of  course  too  shrewd  to  make  of 
genius  merely  a  product,  to  claim  that  it  can  be  dealt 
with  merely  in  terms  of  heredity  and  environment.  "  Very 
great  individuals,"  he  says, "  are  independent  of  a  group  " 1 
(Les  tres  grands  individus  sepassent  de  groupe)?  They 
become  a  centre  themselves  and  people  gather  about 
them.  Ordinary  talents  are  imprisoned  in  their  time,  he 
says,  following  Goethe;  when  they  have  given  back  to 
their  time  what  they  have  received  from  it,  they  are 
poor.  But  the  true  genius  does  not  depend  on  borrowed 
waters,  he  is  an  ever-flowing  fountain.  Sainte-Beuve 

1  "  Group "  as  used  by  Sainte-Beuve   is  applied  to  individuals  born 
about  the  same  time  and  brought  more  or  less  into  contact  with  one  an- 
other. It  is  not  to  be  confounded  with  a  "  natural  family  of  minds, "  the 
members  of  which  may  be  widely  scattered  in  time  and  space. 

2  N.  Lundis,  m,  23. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  163 

pointed  out  with  masterly  precision  the  weakness  of  the 
naturalistic  method  when  pushed  to  its  last  extremity 
by  Taine.  He  had,  at  all  events,  in  a  high  degree  the  sense 
of  the  uniqueness  and  inexpressibleness  of  the  human 
monad.  There  are  no  equivalents,  he  insists,  in  matters  of 
taste.  Suppose  one  great  talent  less,  suppose  the  magic 
mirror  of  a  single  true  poet  shattered  in  the  cradle  at  its 
birth,  there  will  never  be  another  that  will  be  exactly  the 
same  or  that  will  take  the  place  of  it.1  As  some  one  puts  it, 
one  trembles  to  think  that  Shakespeare  and  Cervantes 
were  subject  to  the  measles  at  the  same  time. 

Yet  Sainte-Beuve  has  his  own  naturalistic  method  and 
cannot  refrain  from  a  certain  satisfaction  when  an  author 
and  his  work  are  less  unique  and  so  more  capable  of 
being  explained.  "  In  truth,"  he  says,  "  M.  Coulmann 
pleases  me  in  his  'Memoires'  by  his  very  lack  of  all 
originality.  He  is  the  honorable  and  facile  expression  of 
the  environment  in  which  he  lives ;  he  registers  its  temper- 
ature for  us  with  a  good  deal  of  precision,  without  the 
admixture  or  resistance  of  too  individual  a  character."  2 
We  here  begin  to  see  how  Sainte-Beuve,  without  being 
pseudo-scientific  himself,  yet  points  the  way  to  pseudo- 
science.  This  passage  is  a  sort  of  first  adumbration  of 
the  pseudo-scientific  theory  of  the  normal  man.  "Nor- 
mally," says  Sainte-Beuve,  "fifteen  years  constitute 
a  literary  career."  3  His  own  career  ran  to  just  three 
times  this  length,  and  he  ended  in  better  form  than  he 
began.  He  was  also  comparatively  cheerful  at  the  end, 
whereas  at  the  beginning  he  was  lugubrious.  That  first 

i  N.  Lundis,  vni,  86.  *  Ibid.,  K,  141.  •  Ibid.,  m,  27. 


164  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

bloom  of  youth  that  he  in  general  found  so  enchanting, 
was  in  his  own  case  a  fleur  du  mal.  How  are  we  to  ac- 
count by  Sainte-Beuve's  method  for  the  fact  that  Tenny- 
son wrote  some  of  his  best  lyrics  ("  Crossing  the  Bar,"  for 
example)  when  above  seventy,  that  Titian  painted  some  of 
his  best  pictures  when  above  eighty,  that  Sophocles  wrote 
one  of  his  best  plays,  the  "(Edipus  at  Colonus,"  when 
above  ninety?  Yes,  we  are  told,  but  these  men  are  excep- 
tions. The  obvious  reply  is  that  men  have  a  rank  in 
literature  only  by  being  exceptional  and  that  in  order 
to  have  high  rank  they  must  be  supremely  exceptional. 
Thereupon  the  pseudo-scientist,  who  sees  the  human 
spirit  escaping  him,  takes  the  step  that  Sainte-Beuve 
does  not  himself  take,  and  identifies  the  exceptional  with 
the  morbid  and  the  pathological.  The  man  who  is  not 
normal  as  he  understands  the  term,  that  is,  who  is  not 
studiously  commonplace  and  above  all  unimaginative, 
he  sets  down  as  a  distinguished  degenerate.  Few  things 
are  likely  to  seem  more  repulsive  in  the  retrospect  than 
the  dealings  of  pseudo-science  in  the  second  half  of 
the  nineteenth  century  with  the  man  of  genius.  There  is 
something  in  the  spirit  of  man  that  looks  down  upon  and 
mocks  these  attempts  of  the  scientific  intellect  to  confine 
it  in  formulae,  of  the  lower  element  to  impose  itself  dog- 
matically on  the  higher.  We  should  admit,  however, 
that  the  emotional  side  of  the  modern  movement  has 
cooperated  here  as  elsewhere  with  the  scientific  side  and 
produced  in  confirmation  of  the  thesis  a  long  series  of 
eccentric  and  pathological  geniuses  from  Rousseau  down. 
The  whole  confusion  as  to  the  nature  of  genius  has 


SAINTE-BEUVE  165 

arisen  from  a  neglect  of  Plato's  simple  distinction  be- 
tween the  two  kinds  of  madness  —  "  the  one  produced 
by  human  infirmity,  the  other  by  a  divine  release  from 
the  ordinary  ways  of  men."  To  feel  a  writer's  "madness  " 
in  the  Platonic  sense  is  to  feel  his  sheer  elevation.  Man, 
says  Emerson,  is  great  only  by  the  supernatural;  and 
this  coincides  with  the  definition  Longinus  gives  of  the 
sublime.1  Both  writers,  it  scarcely  seems  necessary  to 
add,  mean  by  the  supernatural  not  the  thaumaturgical, 
but  what  is  above  the  ordinary  intellect.  Now  Sainte- 
Beuve  had  comparatively  little  of  the  Longinian  or 
Emersonian  sense  of  the  sublime.  He  asserted  that  this 
lack  was  more  or  less  a  racial  trait.  In  his  criticism 
as  in  his  poetry  he  was,  in  his  own  phrase,  for  stopping 
half-way  up  the  hill.  Criticism,  one  may  add,  as  he  con- 
ceives it,  is  a  sort  of  half  creation  (like  that  of  an  actor 
creating  a  role),  and  he  has  been  accused,  as  various 
actors  have  been,  of  preferring  a  role  in  which  his  own 
creative  power  would  not  be  too  much  overshadowed  by 
that  of  his  author. 

Whatever  the  cause,  he  is  plainly  more  concerned  in 
arriving  at  horizontality,  if  I  may  be  allowed  the  word, 
than  in  determining  altitudes.  There  is  an  element  of 
truth  in  the  saying  that  in  his  pages  all  men  are  six 
feet  tall.  He  exercises  his  incomparable  gift  for  psycho- 
logical biography  with  at  least  as  much  complacency  on 
second-rate  as  on  first-rate  writers.  He  obeys  too  far  at 
times  the  injunction  ne  despicias  minores.  One  angel, 
we  are  told,  differs  from  another  angel  in  glory.  His 

1  On  the  Sublime,  c.  xxzvi. 


166  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

effort  at  times  would  seem  rather  to  show  how  one 
minor  author  differs  from  another  minor  author  in  in- 
significance. I  have  already  dwelt  on  his  gift  for  dis- 
covering even  in  the  smallest  writer  his  shade  of  origin- 
ality. Like  a  modern  pragmatist  he  escapes  from  the 
formulae  of  the  intellectualist  by  his  lively  intuitions 
of  the  Many,  and  not  like  a  Platonist  by  his  intuitions 
of  the  One.  He  is  therefore  less  excellent  in  showing 
wherein  a  man  is  great  than  wherein  he  is  individual. 
He  did  not  undertake,  however,  to  topple  over  the  ped- 
estals of  any  of  the  supreme  figures  of  literature  (with 
the  very  doubtful  exception  of  Chateaubriand),  but  is 
inclined  at  times  to  pass  these  figures  by.  He  is  more 
at  home,  it  has  been  said,  with  the  Greek  Anthology 
than  with  ^Eschylus.  There  is  an  evident  opposition  be- 
tween his  naturalistic  temper  and  the  Longinian  or 
Emersonian  doctrine  that  man  is  great  only  by  the  super- 
natural. The  general  result  of  his  method  is  on  the 
contrary,  as  he  expresses  it,  to  "  desupernaturalize " 
genius. 

VI 

I  have  reserved  for  more  detailed  treatment  at  this 
point  the  side  of  Sainte-Beuve's  method  that  tends  most 
clearly  to  desupernaturalize  genius,  but  also  shows  how 
his  naturalism  was  happily  tempered  even  in  its  extreme 
applications  by  his  humanism.  The  doctrine  I  refer  to, 
if  one  may  use  so  dogmatic  a  word  in  speaking  of 
Sainte-Beuve,  is  that  of  the  master  faculty  along  with 
the  closely  allied  theories  of  natural  sympathies  and  an- 
tipathies and  of  the  "  natural  families  of  intellects." 


SAINTE-BEUVE  167 

The  more  general  hypothesis  as  to  natural  families  of 
intellects  may  be  dismissed  very  briefly  for  the  reason 
that  Sainte-Beuve  himself  makes  only  slight  use  of  it. 
If  worked  out  with  any  rigor,  it  would  almost  inevitably 
run  into  pseudo-science.  If  we  note  certain  recurring 
types  in  human  history,  the  type  of  the  great  dominator 
like  Richelieu  or  Bonaparte,  for  example,  are  we  to  trace 
their  common  passion  for  domination  to  the  fact  that 
they  were  conformed  organically,  and  one  is  tempted  to 
say  zoologically,  in  the  same  way?  Sainte-Beuve  even 
speaks  in  one  passage  of  a  natural  family  of  mystics.1  In 
such  classifications  he  does  not  seem  to  have  avoided 
entirely  that  dangerous  juggling  with  the  words  "  nature ' ' 
and  "  natural "  that  so  permeates  our  modern  thought. 
There  evidently  intervenes  here  a  force  that  is  peculiar 
to  human  nature,  the  instinct  of  conscious  imitation 
even  of  the  distant  past.  If  one  of  the  mystics  Sainte- 
Beuve  mentions  had  lived  on  an  island  in  the  South 
Sea,  and  had  never  heard  of  Saint  Augustine  or  of 
Christianity  in  general,  would  he  have  become  a  mystic 
by  the  fatal  unfolding  of  some  inner  organ  or  faculty? 

That  men  are  born  with  certain  leanings  and  are 
drawn  to  men  who  have  leanings  like  their  own  and  re- 
pelled by  those  whose  leanings  are  too  different,  is  not 
in  itself  a  pseudo-scientific  theory,  but  a  fact,  a  fact 
indeed  so  patent  that  men  observed  it  long  ago  and  de- 
vised their  own  explanations.  Some  knowledge  of  this 
past  theory  is  an  aid  to  the  understanding  of  the  theory 
in  its  modern  phases.  Sainte-Beuve  himself  frequently 

1  Port-Royal,  iv,  322. 


168  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

refers  to  Pope  and  his  utterances  on  the  ruling  pas- 
sion ;  it  may  be  helpful  to  go  for  a  moment  even  behind 
Pope. 

The  older  explanations  are  usually  associated  with  the 
theory  of  the  humors  which  comes  down  from  classical 
antiquity.  A  man's  temperament  was  supposed  to  arise 
from  the  proportion  in  which  the  four  elements  were 
mingled  in  him  :  — 

"  Hot,  Cold,  Moist  and  Dry,  four  champions  fierce, 
Strive  here  for  mastery." 

The  element  that  prevailed  over  the  others  determined 
his  humor.  Men  of  similar  humors  naturally  attracted, 
those  of  opposite  complexions  naturally  repelled,  one 
another.  Ben  Jonson's  familiar  definition  of  a  humor 
also  defines  excellently  the  ruling  passion :  — 

"When  some  one  peculiar  quality 
Doth  so  possess  a  man,  that  it  doth  draw 
All  his  affects,  his  spirits  and  his  powers 
In  their  con  fluxions  all  to  run  one  way, 
This  may  be  truly  said  to  be  a  humor." 

The  humors  in  their  attractions  and  repulsions  were  also 
accounted  for  astrologically.  Men  were  differently  con- 
stellated. According  to  the  ruling  planet  their  disposi- 
tions were  jovial,  mercurial,  saturnine,  etc. 

In  the  course  of  the  seventeenth  and  early  eighteenth 
centuries,  the  theory  of  humors  passes  over  into  that 
of  the  ruling  passion.  We  can  follow  in  the  process  a 
gradual  yielding  of  the  religious  or  the  humanistic  to  the 
naturalistic  view  of  life.  From  this  point  of  view  Pope's 
"Epistle  to  Cobham"  marks  an  epoch.  The  frequency 


SAINTE-BEUVE  169 

with  which  Sainte-Beuve  refers  to  Pope  is  perhaps  due  in 
part  to  his  satisfaction  at  finding  a  humanistic  authority 
for  a  conception  that  in  its  extreme  form  is  subversive 
of  both  humanism  and  religion.  The  confusion  in  Pope's 
own  mind  between  the  two  opposing  views  of  life  is 
evident.  At  one  moment  he  tells  us  that  the  ruling  pas- 
sion is  the  "mind's  disease,"  at  another  he  proclaims, 
like  a  disciple  of  Rousseau, 

"  The  surest  virtues  thus  from  passions  shoot, 
Wild  nature's  vigor  working  at  the  root." 

Dr.  Johnson  at  any  rate  is  not  open  to  the  charge  of 
inconsistency  in  his  defence  of  the  religious  view  of  life. 
More  than  any  man  of  his  time,  perhaps,  he  saw  the  full 
implication  of  the  theory  of  the  ruling  passion  and  never 
missed  an  opportunity  to  attack  Pope  for  espousing  it. 
"  This  doctrine,"  he  says,  "is  in  itself  pernicious  as  well 
as  false."  "  True  genius  is  a  mind  of  large  general  powers 
accidentally  determined  to  some  particular  direction." 
"  I  am  persuaded  that  had  Sir  Isaac  Newton  applied  to 
poetry  he  would  have  made  a  very  fine  epic  poem.  I 
could  as  easily  apply  to  law  as  to  tragic  poetry."  To  this 
last  assertion  we  assent  with  a  smile.  In  his  indignation 
at  those  who  would  make  mind  mechanical,  Johnson 
plainly  overleapt  himself,  and  flew  in  the  face  of  facts 
of  common  observation. 

Even  more  fatal  to  Johnson's  campaign  against  the 
ruling  passion  was  the  fact  that  it  ran  counter  to  the 
main  currents  of  the  time.  With  the  advent  of  the  ro- 
mantic theory  of  spontaneity,  the  idea  that  a  man  has 
only  to  follow  his  original  genius,  in  other  words,  his 


170  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ruling  impulse,  received  a  tremendous  impetus.  Lamb 
and  Hazlitt,  to  mention  two  representative  romantic 
critics  in  England,  simply  revel  in  fatal  temperamental 
leanings  and  the  sympathies  and  antipathies  that  they 
imply.  "  The  dilatory  man,"  says  Hazlitt,  "  never  be- 
comes punctual.  Resolution  is  no  avail.  .  .  .  Can  you 
talk  or  argue  a  man  out  of  his  humor?  .  .  .  The  disease 
is  in  the  blood,"  etc.  He  believes  in  the  fatality  not  only 
of  individual  but  of  national  humors.  "  Who  shall  make 
the  French  respectable?"  he  asks,  "or  the  English 
amiable?"  Lamb  is  prone  rather  to  dwell  on  inevitable 
attractions  and  repulsions.  He  declares  that  he  himself 
is  "the  veriest  thrall  to  sympathies,  apathies,  antipa- 
thies." He  had  been  trying  all  his  life  to  like  Scotch- 
men and  had  been  obliged  to  desist  from  the  experiment 
in  despair.  His  mind  was  in  its  constitution  essentially 
anti-Caledonian.  He  can  believe  the  story  of  two  per- 
sons meeting  (who  never  saw  one  another  before  in  their 
lives)  and  instantly  fighting.  He  quotes  with  approval 
a  story  from  Haywood's  "  Hierarchic  of  Angels,"  of  a 
Spaniard  who  attempted  to  assassinate  a  King  Ferdi- 
nand of  Spain,  and  being  put  to  the  rack  could  give  no 
other  reason  for  the  deed  but  an  inveterate  antipathy 
which  he  had  taken  to  the  first  sight  of  the  king. 

"  The  cause  which  to  that  act  compelled  him 
Was,  he  ne'er  loved  him  since  he  first  beheld  him." 

The  form  in  which  Thackeray  holds  the  doctrine  is 
even  closer  to  Sainte-Beuve.  "  We  like  or  dislike  each 
other,"  says  Thackeray,  "  as  folks  like  or  dislike  the 
odor  of  certain  flowers,  or  the  taste  of  certain  dishes  or 


SAIOTE-BEUVE  171 

wines,  or  certain  books.  We  can't  tell  why ;  but  as  a  gen- 
eral rule,  all  the  reasons  in  the  world  will  not  make  us 
love  Doctor  Fell,  and  as  sure  as  we  dislike  him,  we  may 
be  sure  that  he  dislikes  us."  Thackeray  would  have  us 
believe  that  an  antipathy  of  this  kind  existed  between 
Fielding  and  Richardson.  "  Fielding  could  n't  do  other- 
wise," he  says,  "  than  laugh  at  the  puny  cockney  book- 
seller, pouring  out  endless  volumes  of  sentimental 
twaddle,  and  hold  him  up  to  scorn  as  a  mollcoddle  and 
a  milksop.  His  genius  had  been  nursed  on  sack-posset, 
and  not  on  dishes  of  tea.  His  muse  had  sung  the  loud- 
est in  tavern  choruses,  had  seen  the  daylight  streaming 
in  over  thousands  of  emptied  bowls,  and  reeled  home 
to  chambers  on  the  shoulders  of  the  watchman.  Rich- 
ardson's goddess  was  attended  by  old  maids  and  dow- 
agers, and  fed  on  muffins  and  bohea.  '  Milksop  ! '  roars 
Harry  Fielding,  clattering  at  the  timid  shop-shutters. 
1  Wretch !  Monster !  Mohock  ! '  shrieks  the  sentimental 
author  of  *  Pamela ' ;  and  all  the  ladies  of  his  court 
cackle  out  an  affrighted  chorus." 

The  theory  of  the  humors,  then,  and  their  inevitable 
attractions  and  repulsions  came  to  Sainte-Beuve  as  a 
part  of  the  naturalistic  inheritance.  First,  as  to  the  at- 
tractions and  repulsions,  we  may  note  a  parallel  here  as 
elsewhere  between  Sainte-Beuve  and  Goethe,  who  is 
nevertheless  no  fatalist.  "  If  we  survey  the  history  of 
the  past,"  says  Goethe,  "  we  shall  everywhere  encounter 
personalities  with  some  of  whom  we  could  agree  and 
with  others  of  whom  we  should  certainly  find  ourselves 
quarreling  ere  long."  We  are  told  to  love  our  neighbor 


172  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

as  ourself .  If  he  belongs  to  a  different  natural  family, 
replies  Sainte-Beuve,  so  far  from  loving  him,  we  are 
forced  to  hate  him.  Que  voulez-vous?  It  is  in  our 
blood  and  temperament.  After  his  wont,  however, 
he  confines  the  theory  to  the  individual.  He  does  not, 
like  other  naturalistic  theorists,  evoke  those  terrific  vis- 
ions of  whole  races  and  nationalities  impelled  to  mutual 
slaughter  by  a  sort  of  zoological  necessity,  the  outcome 
of  almost  imperceptible  differences  in  their  cranial 
measurements.  In  its  application  to  the  individual,  how- 
ever, there  are  few  theories  that  he  employs  more  fre- 
quently. How,  for  instance,  are  you  going  to  force 
Boileau  to  enjoy  Quinault,  or  Fontenelle  to  have  much 
regard  for  Boileau,  or  Joseph  de  Maistre  to  love  Vol- 
taire ? l  Montaigne  and  Malebranche  belonged  to  differ- 
ent natural  families  and  were  mutually  antipathetic ; 2 
so  were  Nisard  and  Ampere,3  Schlegel  and  Sismondi,4 
Mole  and  Alfred  de  Vigny,6  Colle  and  J.-J.  Rousseau,6 
Boileau  and  Perrault,7  etc.  Emerson  called  Poe  the  "  jingle 
man."  That  simply  shows,  Sainte-Beuve  would  have  said, 
that  Poe  and  Emerson  were  natural  antipathies.  "  What 
God  hath  put  asunder,"  as  Emerson  himself  phrases 
it,  "  let  no  man  join  together."  Of  how  many  meetings 
might  one  say  what  De  Quincey  says  of  the  meeting  of 
Wordsworth  and  the  precise,  calculating,  unpoetical 
M.  Simon ;  "  They  met,  they  saw,  they  inter  despised." 
"  As  is  well  known,"  says  Sainte-Beuve,  "  there  is  no- 

i  N.  Lundis,  i,  300.     2  Port-Royal,  v,  391.         •  N.  Lundis,  xra,  236. 

*  Ibid.,  vi,  45.  6  N.  Lundis,  vi,  438.        «  Ibid.,  vn,  376. 

*  Ibid.,  i,  300. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  173 

thing  more  acrimonious  in  its  way  than  the  hatreds  of 
librarians ;  that  is  to  say,  of  people  who  see  one  another 
daily,  who  are  seated  almost  opposite  one  another,  who 
detest  each  other  from  one  table  to  another  and  who 
spend  their  lives  in  accumulating  contrary  fluids."1  Li- 
brarians are  thus  put  on  a  level  with  electric  jars.  Does 
not  Sainte-Beuve  often  make  the  whole  process  too  in- 
stinctive? An  agreement  or  conflict  of  interests  may 
run  counter  to  these  temperamental  fatalities  and  rise 
superior  to  them.  If  the  English  and  Germans  are  now 
glowering  at  each  other  across  the  Channel,  it  is  less 
because  they  are  naturally  antipathetic  than  because  they 
conflict  in  their  interests  and  ambitions.  A  century  ago 
when  they  had  similar  interests  and  ambitions,  they 
sank  their  natural  antipathies  (assuming  that  any  such 
exist).  A  change  or  shifting  of  belief  again  draws  a 
man  towards  many  persons  by  whom  he  was  formerly 
repelled.  Renan,  for  example,  when  young,  attacked 
Beranger  and  his  epicurean  philosophy.  Sainte-Beuve 
declared  that  Beranger  and  Renan  were  natural  an- 
tipathies, but  as  Renan  himself  grew  more  epicurean 
with  advancing  years,  he  came  to  praise  in  Beranger 
the  very  traits  he  had  formerly  blamed.2 

VII 

But  let  us  come  to  Sainte-Beuve's  ideas  about  the 
master  faculty  itself  of  which  the  theory  of  sympathies 
and  antipathies  is  after  all  only  one  aspect.  As  a  dis- 
ciple of  La  Rochefoucauld  Sainte-Beuve  believed  that 

1  N.  Lundis,  v,  452.  »  Cf.  p.  288. 


174  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

a  man  is  always  governed  in  the  last  analysis  by  his 
self-love.  Now  what  is  most  intimate  in  a  man's  self  is 
the  master  impulse  that  has  been  implanted  in  him  by 
nature.  A  main  form  of  self-love  is  therefore  the  pas- 
sion for  self-expression,  for  the  unrestrained  play  of  this 
master  impulse.  This  is  the  secret  mainspring  that  ex- 
plains everything  else.  A  man  may  restrain  to  some 
extent  his  minor  impulses,  but  not  his  master  impulse 
—  lejeu  de  la  faculte  premiere  is  beyond  his  control. 
Sainte-Beuve  generalized  in  part  from  his  own  experi- 
ence with  the  pseudo-idealists  of  the  romantic  move- 
ment. "  I  do  not  believe  in  the  freedom  of  the  will,"  he 
wrote  to  Cousin,  "  because  I  do  not  believe  that  it  is  in 
your  power  to  put  a  check  on  your  main  appetite."  1 
Temperament  understood  in  this  sense  is,  as  Emerson 
says,  "  unconsumable  even  in  the  fires  of  religion."  "It 
puts  all  divinity  to  rout."  Sainte-Beuve  takes  an  almost 
malicious  pleasure  in  showing  the  survival  of  the  ego  in 
its  essential  impulse  even  after  religious  conversion. 
Converts  are  no  friends  of  mine,  said  Goethe.  Sainte- 
Beuve  might  have  said  the  same,  and  this  because  con- 
versions are  "  upsets  of  nature,"  2  denials  of  the  law  of 
temperament.  On  a  beau  etre  saint,  on  a  son  petit 
amour-propre.*  "  The  mark  of  the  natural  vocation  still 
persists  under  the  cross."  4  Each  Port-Royalist  still  pre- 
serves after  conversion  distinct  traits  of  his  tempera- 
ment and  nature.  Pascal  even  when  converted  retains 
his  passion  for  geometry  (though  flattering  himself  that 

1  Cor.,  1, 118.  2  Port-Royal,  I,  401. 

8  Port-Royal,  n,  284.  *  Ibid.,  TV,  335. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  175 

he  despises  it).  Racine  in  his  nights  of  repentance  was 
haunted  by  some  passionate  tragedy,  by  the  figure  of 
some  Monime  in  tears,  and  before  he  could  reduce  the 
guilty  vision  to  silence,  he  composed  melodious  lines, 
whole  scenes  perhaps,  that  were  heard  by  himself  alone.1 
But  a  rare  and  special  gift  like  that  of  Racine  is 
itself  susceptible  of  a  religious  explanation.  Talent, 
Sainte-Beuve  admits,  is  at  the  origin  a  gratuitous  gift, 
a  sort  of  undeserved  predestination,  in  a  word  a  grace, 
in  all  the  rigor  of  the  Jansenist  and  Augustinian  sense, 
quite  apart  from  a  man's  will  and  works.  You  thus  find 
"  deep  down  in  the  gifted  individual  one  of  those  mys- 
teries which  show  to  what  a  point  psychological  observ- 
ation alone  encounters  in  other  terms  the  same  prob- 
lems as  theology."  2  Still  it  makes  a  difference  whether 
one  deals  with  these  problems  in  a  religious  or  natural- 
istic temper.  "  There  is  no  lack  of  people,"  he  says, 
"  who  are  scandalized  every  time  that  they  thus  find  set 
forth  without  any  concealment  the  doctrine  of  divine 
grace.  But  have  these  same  persons  ever  reflected  on 
that  strange  fatality  which  sets  its  deep  and  distinct 
mark  upon  us  even  from  our  birth  and  childhood? 
Either  these  persons  are  religious  or  they  are  not.  If 
they  are  not  religious,  I  can  understand  perfectly  that 
they  fall  back  on  the  physiological  explanation  of  race, 
temperament,  etc.  If  on  the  other  hand  they  do  think 
themselves  religious,  to  what  doctrine  will  they  have  re- 
course which  does  not  enter  into  that  of  divine  grace  ?  " 
(We  may  note  in  passing  that  Sainte-Beuve  neglects  a 

1  Port-Royal,  m,  315.  2  Ibid.,  i,  116. 


176  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

third  hypothesis,  that  embodied  in  the  Oriental  doctrine 
of  karma).  "  But  after  all  most  minds  are  neither  relig- 
ious nor  the  contrary.  They  float  around  in  the  inter- 
mediary space  and  shrink  from  the  consequences :  they 
remain  at  the  halfway  house  in  everything — this  is 
what  is  called  common  sense,  that  is  to  say,  the  average 
degree  of  illusion."  l 

In  the  battle  that  is  thus  engaged,  as  he  phrases  it, 
between  the  Christian  and  naturalistic  moralists 2  he 
plainly  inclines  towards  the  latter.  Speaking  of  Male- 
branche  he  says,  "  I  hope  I  may  be  allowed  a  compari- 
son which  would  make  solemn  philosophers  frown  if 
there  were  any  left,  but  which  would  make  Montaigne 
smile.  Malebranche  discovered  one  day  his  talent  for 
metaphysics  on  reading  Descartes's  treatise  on  ( Man,' 
just  as  Garat,  the  singer,  discovered  one  day  his  voice 
when  still  a  child  and  on  coming  out  of  a  performance 
of  the  '  Armide '  of  Gluck.  The  latter,  the  singer,  disap- 
peared for  more  than  a  day.  His  family  searched  for 
him  ;  his  father,  worried,  had  the  streets  of  the  city 
scoured  in  every  direction.  One  of  his  brothers,  going 
to  the  further  end  of  the  garden,  found  open  an  old 
store-room  that  was  usually  closed.  He  enters  there, 
and  finds  to  his  great  amazement  the  young  Garat. 
*  What 's  the  matter  ?  What  are  you  doing  here  ?  '  f  Si- 
lence,' said  the  boy,  '  sit  down  and  listen.'  And  he  be- 
gan to  sing  to  him  the  opera  of ( Armide '  which  he  knew 
by  heart  without  having  learned  it,  and  which  he  had 
been  constantly  repeating  like  a  nightingale  for  twenty- 
1  Port-Royal,  ui,  491.  2  Ibid.,  vi,  107. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  177 

four  hours  past.  Divine  singer,  and  almost  divine  meta- 
physician, your  themes  and  your  music  differ,  but  it  is 
from  nature  that  you  both  proceed." 

We  have  heard  of  the  poets  who  lisped  in  numbers, 
for  the  numbers  came.  Sainte-Beuve  is  very  fond  in 
general  of  studying  this  first  awakening  of  a  vocation.1 
M.  Le  Tourneux,  for  example,  was  born  a  preacher. 
When  he  was  still  a  child  at  Rouen,  people  used  to 
amuse  themselves  after  church  by  setting  him  up  on  an 
arm-chair  and  getting  him  to  preach  over  again  the  ser- 
mon they  had  just  heard.2  As  often  conceived  by  Sainte- 
Beuve  the  master  faculty  is  plainly  organic.  Thus  he 
says  of  Horace  Vernet  that  "on  both  his  father's  and 
mother's  side  everything  had  contributed  to  make  of 
him  a  man  of  the  brush,  —  involuntarily  and  irresistibly 
a  painter;  his  hand,  delicate,  slender,  long  and  elegant, 
was  born  with  all  the  special  aptitudes,  ready  formed 
and  fitted  to  paint  as  the  foot  of  the  Arab  horse  is  to 
run."  3  Here  again  we  are  reminded  of  Thackeray.  "'I 
never  can  desire,'  says  Mrs.  Warrington,  'that  my  son 
and  the  grandson  of  the  Marquis  of  Esmond  should  be 
a  fiddler.'  l  Should  be  a  fiddlestick,  my  dear,'  the  old 
colonel  answered.  i .  .  .  Suppose  George  loves  music  ? 
You  can  no  more  stop  him  than  you  can  order  a  rose 
not  to  smell  sweet,  or  a  bird  not  to  sing.'  *  A  bird !  a 
bird  sings  from  nature ;  George  did  not  come  into  the 
world  with  a  fiddle  in  his  hand,'  says  Mrs.  Warrington 
with  a  toss  of  her  head."  I  confess  that  my  sympathies 
in  this  dialogue  are  with 'Mrs.  Warrington. 

i  Port-Royal,  iv,  8.  a  Ibid .,  v,  210.  •  N.  Lundis,  v,  43. 


178  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

At  other  times  the  master  faculty  appears  to  Sainte- 
Beuve  in  its  early  manifestations  as  a  sort  of  daemonic 
power,  almost  independent  of  the  conscious  self  and 
riding  it  irresistibly.  "His  vocation  gets  the  upper 
hand,"  he  says  of  Moliere,  and  the  "  demon  rages  within 
him  never  to  cease  again.  .  .  .  The  theatre  needed  him, 
and  he  needed  the  theatre."  l  Racine  again  was  ready 
to  attack  even  his  saintly  masters  of  Port-Royal  when 
he  found  them  in  the  way  of  his  passion.  "  Woe  to  those, 
whoever  they  may  be,  that  you  thus  encounter  across 
the  path  of  your  master  passion  when  it  is  in  haste  to 
find  an  outlet.  They  make  a  mistake.  Later  when  this 
poetical  passion  is  satisfied  and  about  exhausted,  Racine 
will  return  to  them  and  make  them  honorable  amends. 
That  will  be  easy  for  him,  the  favorite  passion,  the  young, 
greedy,  hungry  and  irritated  passion  no  longer  being 
there  between  them  and  him."  2 

Just  as  Sainte-Beuve  likes  to  show  that  the  secret 
mainspring  of  every  man  is  operative  in  him  even  before 
the  awakening  of  reason,  so  he  likes  to  show,  very  much 
in  the  fashion  of  Pope,  that  it  survives  reason  and  sets 
its  seal  on  his  dying  breath :  "  The  miser  up  to  the  last 
moment  refuses  to  say  '  I  give.'  If  you  whisper  in  the 
ear  of  the  geometrician  in  his  death  agony, '  What  is  the 
square  of  twelve?'  he  will  answer  as  though  you  had 
pressed  the  spring  of  a  machine,  'One  hundred  and 
forty-four.'  The  poet  is  infatuated  with  immortality  and 
thinks  of  his  verses.  The  hero  sees  once  more  in  his 
delirium  his  military  trophies  and  his  comrades  in  the 

»  N.  Lundis,  v,  270.  *  Ibid.,  vi,  98. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  179 

clouds.  The  writer  dies  correcting  proof.  .  .  .  Paillet 
asked  to  have  his  lawyer's  gown  for  a  shroud.  A  jockey, 
knocked  over  in  a  race,  and  rolling  half  dead  upon  the 
track,  still  moved  his  fingers,  muttering,  'My  whip.'  In 
Balzac  the  Baron  Hulot,  in  his  dotage,  says  to  his  cook 
to  seduce  her,  '  Agathe,  you  will  be  a  baroness ' ;  and  he 
will  live  long  enough  to  keep  his  promise.  Every  man 
dies  in  his  own  element."  1 

The  last  words  of  Piron,  says  Sainte-Beuve,  must  have 
been  a  diatribe  against  Voltaire.  Sainte-Beuve's  treat- 
ment of  Piron  illustrates,  indeed,  his  view  of  the  master 
faculty  in  its  extreme  form  and  so  is  worth  dwelling  on 
for  a  moment.  Piron's  ruling  impulse  was  to  make  epi- 
grams. He  was  an  admirable  automaton,  according  to 
Sainte-Beuve,  set  up  by  nature  to  launch  sallies  and 
epigrams.2  "  Whether  it  was  the  Almighty,  a  friend,  a 
relative,  anybody  in  fact,  when  a  bright  saying  came  to 
the  tip  of  his  tongue  he  did  not  hold  it  back.  Some  one 
has  said  :  La  Fontaine  grew  fables,  Tallemant  bore  anec- 
dotes, Petrarch  distilled  sonnets,  Piron  sneezed  epigrams. 
Sneeze  was  Piron's  own  word.  Well,  you  can't  hold 
back  a  sneeze." 3  Piron  not  only  made  epigrams  through- 
out his  life,  he  arranged  to  keep  on  making  them  after  his 
death.  "Voltaire,  as  long  as  I  lived,"  he  wrote,  "hardly 
ventured  to  attack  me.  But  I  know  him.  The  rogue  is 
cowardly  enough  to  insult  me  after  I  am  gone,  as  he  did 
my  illustrious  fellow-countryman,  Crebillon.  I  have  fore- 
seen his  kindly  intentions.  Amongst  my  manuscripts  is 
a  little  box  containing  a  hundred  and  fifty  epigrams  in 

»  N.  Lundis,  vra,  128.  *  Ibid.,  vn,  463.  8  Ibid.,  400. 


180  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

his  honor.  If,  when  I  am  no  more,  he  breathes  the 
slightest  word  against  me,  I  direct  my  literary  heir  to 
send  every  week  one  of  these  epigrams  to  Ferney.  This 
little  supply  thus  husbanded  will  cheer  up  for  three 
years  the  solitude  of  the  respectable  old  gentleman  dwell- 
ing in  that  canton."1 

We  are  reminded  of  Victor  Hugo  and  his  ruling  passion 
for  making  antitheses.  He  kept  on  making  them  all  his 
life,  his  dying  utterance  was  an  antithesis  (c'est  le 
combat  du  jour  et  de  la  nuit\  and  he  arranged  for  an 
antithetical  funeral.  He  was  buried  in  the  midst  of 
almost  unheard-of  pomp  and  ceremony,  but  according 
to  his  own  directions  in  a  paupers'  hearse.  We  find  in 
Hugo  not  merely  the  practice  but  the  theory  of  the 
master  faculty.  The  genius,  he  would  have  us  believe, 
is  the  man  who  cannot  control  himself.  As  regards  his 
inspiration  the  great  poet  is  like  Mazeppa  bound  and 
helpless  on  the  back  of  the  courser  that  is  bearing  him 
headlong  over  the  steppes.2  Of  Shakespeare  in  particular, 
Hugo  says  that  he  was  "badly  bridled  on  purpose  by 
God,  so  that  he  might  go  soaring  with  free  sweep  of 
the  wing  through  the  infinite."  One  cannot  help  reflect- 
ing that  this  is  also  Taine's  view  of  Shakespeare — except 
of  course,  that  Taine  does  not  put  romantic  unrestraint 

1  N.  Lundis,  vn,  463. 

a  "  Ainsi,  lorsqu'un  mortel,  sur  qui  son  dieu  s'dtale, 
S'est  vu  lier  vivant  sur  ta  croupe  f atale, 

Gduie,  ardent  coursier, 

En  vain  il  lutte,  helas  !  tu  bondis,  tu  1'emportes, 
Hors  du  monde  re*el,  dont  tu  brises  les  portes 
Avec  tes  pieds  d'acier  ! " 

(Let  Orientates.) 


3 

c  \ 

SAINTE-BEUVE  181 

under  the  immediate  patronage  of  God.  True  human  spon- 
taneity is  shown,  not  in  following,  but  in  resisting  im- 
pulse. By  exalting  the  opposite  type  of  spontaneity  — 
the  triumph  of  the  unconscious  and  instinctive  over 
the  conscious  and  rational  self  —  the  Rousseauist  plays 
directly  into  the  hands  of  the  determinist,  another  ex- 
ample of  the  perpetual  irony  that  besets  this  form  of 
romanticism.  Taine  bases  on  Michelet,  one  of  the  most 
spontaneous  of  all  writers  in  the  Rousseauistic  sense, 
his  assertion  that  "the  human  spirit  is  constructed  as 
mathematically  as  a  watch."  Indeed,  no  subject  per- 
haps illustrates  more  clearly  than  this  of  the  master 
faculty,  the  way  in  which  science  and  Rousseauistic 
romanticism  have  cooperated  during  the  last  century  in 
the  dehumanizing  of  man. 

vm 

Taine  was  largely  influenced  in  his  theory  of  the 
master  faculty  by  Balzac  who  more  perhaps  than  any 
other  great  creative  writer  of  the  century  takes  the  de- 
terministic view.  Characters  not  only  appear  in  the 
pages  of  Balzac  as  the  product  of  a  highly  complex  en- 
vironment, but  each  one  of  bis  main  characters  tends 
to  be  the  logical  working  out  of  a  ruling  passion.  We 
have  already  seen  that  Sainte-Beuve  himself  cites  one 
of  the  characters  of  Balzac  in  support  of  the  master 
faculty.  Yet  right  here  we  are  to  note  that  he  diverges 
sharply  from  Balzac  and  those  who,  like  him,  are  for 
carrying  through  the  theory  to  the  end.  Theoretically 
Sainte-Beuve  leaves  us  no  choice,  if  we  would  avoid  su- 


182  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

perficiality,  between  a  purely  naturalistic  or  else  a  purely 
theological  attitude  towards  the  master  faculty.  But  in 
practice  he  refuses  to  be  impaled  on  the  horns  of  his 
own  dilemma ;  he  prefers  to  remain  in  the  "  average  de- 
gree of  illusion  known  as  common  sense,"  or  rather 
what  gets  the  better  of  him  is  the  humanistic  dislike 
of  extremes,  naturalistic  or  other.  If  as  a  naturalist  he 
believes  in  the  master  faculty,  as  a  humanist  he  de- 
mands the  balanced  faculty,  the  faculty  that  is  kept 
under  control  and  tempered  by  its  opposite.  He  attacks 
Balzac  and  the  disciples  of  Balzac  on  this  very  point.1 
He  is  ready  enough  to  grant  that  a  Piron  was  a  mere 
machine  for  making  epigrams,  but  not  that  the  great 
writers  of  the  world  have  been  nothing  more  than  sub- 
lime automatons  and  monomaniacs  of  genius.  He  had  a 
naturalistic  distrust  of  the  power  of  the  individual  to 
put  a  check  upon  himself,  and  believed  at  the  same  time 
that  art  requires  restraint.  Here  is  in  part  the  secret  of 
the  high  regard  he  had  during  his  later  years  for  a 
critic  like  Boileau,  who  was  a  visible  principle  of  au- 
thority and  supplied  the  writers  of  his  time  with  the 
curb  they  might  not  have  found  in  themselves.  Sainte- 
Beuve's  judgment  on  Boileau  is  worth  quoting,  both 
from  this  point  of  view  and  as  the  homage  of  the  great- 
est modern  French  critic  to  the  chief  representative  of 
the  older  school  of  criticism :  "  Let  us  salute  and  ac- 
knowledge to-day  the  noble  and  mighty  harmony  of  the 
grand  siecle.  Without  Boileau,  and  without  Louis  XIV, 
who  recognized  Boileau  as  his  Superintendent  of  Par- 

i  N.  lundis,  x,  262. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  183 

nassus,  what  would  have  happened?  Would  even  the 
most  talented  have  produced  in  the  same  degree  what 
forms  their  surest  heritage  of  glory?  Racine,  I  fear, 
would  have  written  more  plays  like  '  Berenice ' ;  La  Fon- 
taine fewer  '  Fables '  and  more  '  Contes ' ;  Moliere  him- 
self would  have  run  to  '  Scapins,'  and  might  not  have 
attained  to  the  austere  eminence  of  '  Le  Misanthrope.' 
In  a  word,  each  of  these  fair  geniuses  would  have 
abounded  in  his  natural  defects.  Boileau.,  that  is  to  say, 
the  common  sense  of  the  poet-critic  authorized  and  con- 
firmed by  that  of  a  great  king,  constrained  them  and 
kept  them,  by  the  respect  for  his  presence,  to  their  bet- 
ter and  graver  tasks.  And  do  you  know  what,  in  our 
days,  has  failed  our  poets,  so  strong  at  their  beginning 
in  native  ability,  so  filled  with  promise  and  happy  inspir- 
ation ?  There  failed  them  a  Boileau  and  an  enlightened 
monarch,  the  twain  supporting  and  consecrating  each 
other.  So  it  is  these  men  of  talent,  seeing  themselves 
in  an  age  of  anarchy  and  without  discipline,  have  not 
hesitated  to  behave  accordingly ;  they  have  behaved,  to 
be  perfectly  frank,  not  like  exalted  geniuses,  or  even 
like  men,  but  like  schoolboys  out  of  school.  We  have 
seen  the  result." 

Sainte-Beuve  is  at  his  best  in  his  insistence  on  the 
necessity  of  a  balance  of  virtues  in  true  greatness.  The 
contrast  is  striking  between  his  gentle  and  humane 
Shakespeare  and  the  Shakespeare  of  Taine,  who  is  an 
unchained  force  of  nature,  "  the  most  immoderate  of 
all  violators  of  language."  In  the  following  passage 
taken  from  his  address  on  "  Tradition  in  Literature  "  * 

1  Lttndis,  xv,  356  S. 


184  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Sainte-Beuve  appears  in  his  happiest  vein  as  a  humanist : 
"  But  great  men  of  letters  have  appeared,  you  will  say, 
quite  outside  of  the  classical  tradition.  Name  them.  I 
know  only  one  such  who  is  indeed  very  great,  Shake- 
speare :  and  are  you  very  sure  that  he  is  entirely 
outside  the  tradition  ?  Had  n't  he  read  Plutarch  and 
Montaigne,  those  copious  repertories,  or  rather  those  re- 
serve hives  of  antiquity,  in  which  so  much  honey  has 
been  stored?  Admirable  poet  and  doubtless  the  most 
natural  since  Homer,  though  in  so  different  a  way.  .  .  . 
Oh,  it  is  not  to  you  that  I  need  to  say  that  this  man  so 
thoroughly  human  was  not  a  savage  or  of  disordered 
mind,  and  that  we  must  not  confuse  him  because  at 
times  he  was  over-energetic  or  over-subtle  —  because  he 
fell  into  the  rudeness  or  excess  of  refinement  of  his  time 
—  with  the  eccentric  and  the  madmen  full  of  them- 
selves, drunk  with  their  own  nature  and  their  own 
works,  drunk  with  their  own  wine.  If  we  saw  him  ap- 
pear of  a  sudden  and  enter  in  person,  I  imagine  him  to 
myself  as  noble  and  humane  of  aspect,  having  nothing 
of  the  bull,  the  wild  boar,  or  even  of  the  lion  ;  bearing 
on  his  countenance,  like  Moliere,  the  noblest  features  of 
the  species  and  those  which  speak  most  immediately  to 
the  mind  and  soul.  I  imagine  him  moderate,  sensible  of 
speech,  and  most  often  (through  pity  or  indulgence) 
smiling  and  gentle.  For  he  too  has  created  beings  of 
ravishing  purity  and  gentleness,  and  he  dwells  in  the 
very  centre  of  human  nature.  Is  it  not  in  him  that  we 
must  seek  the  most  expressive  phrase  to  render  gentle- 
ness itself  —  'the  milk  of  human  kindness'  —  that  qual- 


SAINTE-BEUVE  185 

ity  which  I  always  require  energetic  talents  to  mingle 
with  their  strength  so  that  they  may  not  fall  into  harsh- 
ness and  brutal  off  en  si  ven  ess,  just  as  I  require  of  talents 
who  incline  too  much  to  gentleness  that  there  be  min- 
gled with  them  a  little  of  what  Pliny  and  Lucian 
called  bitterness,  the  salt  and  seasoning  of  strength  : 
for  it  is  thus  that  talents  become  complete :  and  Shake- 
speare in  his  way,  and  save  for  the  faults  of  his  age,  was 
complete.  Be  reassured,  gentlemen,  great  men  of  every 
kind,  and  especially  I  will  say  those  who  are  great  in 
the  order  of  the  intellect,  are  never  madmen  or  barba- 
rians. If  any  writer  appears  to  us  in  his  behavior  and 
in  all  his  personality  violent,  unreasonable,  offensive  to 
good  sense,  and  the  most  natural  proprieties,  he  may 
have  talent  (for  talent,  a  great  talent,  is  compatible  with 
many  faults),  but  be  sure  that  he  is  not  a  writer  of  the 
first  quality  and  the  first  mark  in  humanity.  Homer  at 
times  nods ;  Corneille  in  conversation  is  heavy  and  nods ; 
La  Fontaine  nods ;  they  have  fits  of  forgetf ulness  and 
absent-mindedness.  But  the  greatest  of  men  are  never 
extravagant,  ridiculous,  grotesque,  pretentious,  boast- 
ful, cynical,  constantly  violating  decorum.  As  for  me, 
however  much  I  may  allow  for  the  individual  varieties 
and  peculiarities  of  human  nature,  I  will  never  imagine 
to  myself  the  revered  choir  of  the  five  or  six  great  men 
of  letters  and  creative  geniuses  of  whom  humanity 
boasts  and  who  after  all  can  be  only  the  five  or  six  first 
gentlemen  of  the  world,  as  a  mere  gang  or  pack  of  men 
beside  themselves,  as  monomaniacs  each  one  rushing 
headlong  for  his  prey.  No,  tradition  tells  us  this,  and 


186  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

the  consciousness  of  our  own  civilized  nature  tells  us  so 
even  more  plainly,  reason  always  must  preside,  and  does 
preside  at  last  even  among  these  favorites  and  elect  of 
the  imagination."  * 

Sainte-Beuve  thus  manages  to  get  both  the  truth  and 
the  counter-truth  uttered  on  the  subject  of  the  master 
faculty,  but  with  some  sacrifice  of  coherency.  In  this 
respect  he  is  like  Emerson  who  says  that  there  is  "  no 
adaptation  or  universal  applicability  in  men  but  each 
has  his  special  talent.  .  .  .  We  do  what  we  must  and 
call  it  by  the  best  names  we  can  "  ;  and  then  goes  on  to 
declare  elsewhere  that  "  the  differences  in  men  are  not 
organic."  Emerson's  incoherency,  however,  is  due  to  a 
certain  looseness  and  lack  of  mental  grip  in  linking 
a  genuine  faith  in  human  liberty  with  the  observed 
facts.  The  incoherency  of  Sainte-Beuve,  who  had  a 
tremendous  grip  on  the  facts,  is  due  rather  to  a  final 
absence  of  definite  conviction,  though  he  had  a  strong 
leaning  as  we  have  seen  towards  the  materialistic  side. 
After  reviewing  the  various  beliefs,  naturalistic  and  the- 
ological, on  the  freedom  of  the  will,  he  concludes  as 
follows  : "  How  many  contrasts  and  oppositions !  Before 
this  sea  of  human  opinions  as  on  the  brink  of  an  ocean 
I  wonder  at  the  ebb  and  flow.  Who  will  tell  me  the 
law  of  it  all?"  2 

His  skepticism,  I  believe,  goes  deeper  than  the  vari- 
ous efforts  of  his  time  to  unify  reality  merely  through 
the  intellect  or  the  emotions.  He  saw  all  that  was  im- 
plied in  the  weakening  of  traditional  standards  in  litera- 

1  Lundis,  xv,  366  ff.  2  Port-Royal,  I,  409. 


SAINTE-BEUVE  187 

ture  and  religion,  he  saw  the  approach  of  the  "  great 
confusion  " ; 1  at  the  same  time  he  was  too  clear-sighted 
really  to  warm  up  to  the  new  religions  that  were  of- 
fered as  substitutes  for  the  disciplines  of  the  past.  The 
underlying  method  in  all  these  nineteenth-century  at- 
tempts at  religion  —  whether  it  be  the  religion  of  Pas- 
sion, or  the  religion  of  Beauty,  or  the  religion  of  Science, 
or  the  religion  of  Humanity  —  is  always  the  same  :  to 
take  some  element  of  human  nature  that  is  immensely 
important,  indeed,  but  still  secondary,  and  then  try  to 
exalt  it  to  the  supreme  and  central  place.  We  must  real- 
ize the  completeness  of  Sainte-Beuve's  detachment  from 
every  form  of  faith,  new  or  old,  if  we  are  to  penetrate 
to  the  last  desolate  depth  of  his  inner  life  (jusqu'aufond 
desole  du  gouffre  interieur).  "The  only  unity  I  am 
ambitious  of,"  he  writes,  "is  that  of  comprehending 
everything." 2  But  mere  comprehension  is  not  in  itself  a 
principle  of  unity  at  all,  but  rather  of  dispersion.  In 
aiming  at  nothing  beyond  comprehension,  Sainte-Beuve 
was  destined  to  become,  as  some  one  called  him,  the 
Wandering  Jew  of  the  intellectual  world.  It  is  not  un- 
natural that  he  should  have  suffered  from  the  "  absence 
of  fixed  pole  and  centre,"  and  sought  an  escape  from 
the  "void  that  mined  his  breast"  in  unremitting  toil. 

The  world,  as  the  Latin  adage  has  it,  wishes  to  be  de- 
ceived ( Vult  mundus  dedpi).  On  the  negative  side, 
therefore,  the  function  of  the  critic  is  to  keep  mankind, 
so  far  as  possible  and  in  spite  of  its  natural  proclivity, 
from  being  devoured  by  charlatans.  Sainte-Beuve  pos- 

1  Port,  lit.,  m,  550.  *  Port-Royal,  ra,  589. 


188  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

sessed  in  an  eminent  degree  the  wisdom  of  disillusion 
needful  for  the  performance  of  this  task.  Few  men  have 
practised  with  more  success  the  art  of  not  being  taken 
in ;  and  this  in  an  age,  as  he  himself  points  out,  of  false 
religions,  that  is  of  false  unifications  of  life  and  so  of 
charlatanry.1  "  My  Lucretian  view  of  criticism,"  he  says, 
"is  not  gay,  but  it  is  better  than  the  worship  of  idols." 
But  though  comparatively  free  from  the  illusions  of 
his  time,  he  had  in  the  fullest  measure  its  virtues.  He 
is  likely  to  be  looked  on  more  and  more,  in  M.  France's 
phrase,  as  the  universal  doctor,  the  Saint  Thomas 
Aquinas  of  the  nineteenth  century ;  not  as  the  greatest 
man  of  the  century,  but  possibly  as  the  most  representa- 
tive, the  one  who  embodied  most  completely  its  aspira- 
tion towards  horizontality,  its  magnificent  widening  out 
of  knowledge  and  sympathy,  and,  some  would  add,  its 
lack  of  adequate  central  aim.  That  so  shrewd  an  ob- 
server as  Sainte-Beuve  could  find  no  firm  anchorage  for 
the  spirit  in  the  movements  peculiar  to  this  century  may 
in  the  long  run  turn  out  to  be  not  to  his  discredit,  but 
to  the  discredit  of  the  century.  It  may  become  apparent 
that  something  was  omitted  in  the  whole  nineteenth  cen- 
tury view  of  life  and  that  this  something  is  the  keystone 
of  the  arch. 

1  "  Ce  dix-neuvieme  siecle,  qui  sera  re*putd  en  grande  partie  le  siecle 
(hi  charlatanisnie  Htte'raire,  humanitaire,  e'clectique,  ndocatholiqne,"  etc. 
(N.  Lundis,  v,  263). 


VII 

SCHEREB 

PERHAPS  what  first  strikes  one  about  Scherer  is  the 
contrast  between  his  solid  merit  as  a  critic  and  his  lack 
of  popularity  in  France  either  during  his  life  or  since. 
No  volume  of  his  critical  studies  ever  went  into  a  second 
edition,  and  some  of  the  volumes  are  already  out  of 
print.  He  was  not  even  a  member  of  the  Academy, 
though  more  in  sympathy  with  its  aims  than  almost  any 
other  important  writer  of  the  day.  The  natural  inference 
is  that  he  was  in  certain  respects  out  of  touch  with  his 
time  and  environment.  Scherer  himself  took  pleasure  in 
recalling  that  he  was  born  in  Paris  on  the  Boulevard 
des  Italiens;  but  he  was  far  from  being  a  typical 
Parisian  or  even  a  typical  Frenchman.  In  the  first  place, 
he  was  not  predisposed  to  the  French  point  of  view  by 
his  ancestry.  His  father  was  of  German-Swiss  origin. 
His  grandfather  on  his  mother's  side  was  English,  his 
grandmother  Dutch.  He  lived  in  England  some  time  as 
a  youth  and  thus  acquired  a  perfect  command  of  Eng- 
lish as  well  as  developed  his  hereditary  leaning  towards 
England,  a  leaning  that  appears  most  clearly,  perhaps,  in 
his  love  of  liberty  in  contrast  with  the  French  passion 
for  equality.  Later  he  resided  for  several  years  at  Stras- 
burg,  and  became  deeply  versed  in  German  literature 
and  scholarship,  especially  in  the  "higher  criticism." 
He  also  had  a  thorough  knowledge  of  Italian.  He  was, 


190  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

in  short,  probably  the  most  accomplished  cosmopolitan 
of  his  time,  admirable  in  his  power  to  combine  general 
ideas  with  broad  and  accurate  information. 

But  if  he  was  at  least  half  a  native  in  England  and 
Germany,  he  was  half  a  foreigner  in  Paris.  The  differ- 
ence between  his  outlook  and  that  of  a  Frenchman,  of 
which  one  is  so  conscious,  is  a  matter  of  religion  even 
more  perhaps  than  of  heredity.  It  is  as  important  to  re- 
member in  his  case  that  he  was  an  emancipated  clergy- 
man as  it  is  in  the  case  of  Kenan  that  he  had  studied 
for  the  Catholic  priesthood.  We  might  apply  in  part  to 
Scherer  himself  what  he  says  of  Alexandre  Vinet,  who 
influenced  him  so  deeply :  "  The  French  language  is 
Catholic,  like  the  French  nation,  like  French  literature, 
and  one  may  inquire  whether  a  Protestant,  in  whatever 
circumstances  he  may  be  placed,  ever  loses  entirely  in 
his  thoughts  and  manner  of  writing  the  stamp  of  his 
origin."  *  One  can  feel  in  Scherer's  style,  as  Sainte- 
Beuve  says  you  can  in  that  of  Vinet,  a  certain  theolog- 
ical chill.  It  is  indeed  natural  that  a  man  who  was  a 
professional  theologian  to  the  age  of  forty-five  should, 
even  after  giving  up  theology,  have  retained  a  severe 
moral  reserve.  It  is  equally  inevitable  that  literary  Paris 
should  have  looked  on  him  in  some  degree  as  an  out- 
sider. There  is  a  certain  symbolic  value  in  the  account 
the  Goncourts  give  of  the  way  he  held  himself  aloof  at 
the  Magny  dinners  (Scherer,  epouvante  et  regardant 
la  table  du  haut  de  son  pince-nez).2  On  one  occasion, 

1  Etudes,  i,  281.  Cf .  also  ibid.,  279. 
*  Journal  des  Qoneourts,  22  June,  1863. 


SCHERER  191 

the  Goncourts  relate,  as  the  guests  were  preparing  to 
depart,  Gautier  went  up  to  Scherer,  the  mutest  person 
in  the  company,  and  said  to  him,  "  Come  now,  I  hope 
you  will  improve  the  first  opportunity  to  compromise 
yourself ;  for  we  are  all  compromising  ourselves  and  it 
is  not  fair  that  you  should  remain  among  us  as  a  cold 
observer."  1 

Scherer  had  the  instincts  not  merely  of  a  Protestant 
but  of  a  puritan.  He  came  out,  for  example,  as  a  heretic 
in  his  article  on  Moliere  ("  Une  heresie  litteraire  "),  and 
his  reason  for  protesting  against  the  established  ortho- 
doxy was  that  Moliere  falls  too  far  short  of  purity  in  his 
diction.2  Scherer  protests  against  those  who  were  cor- 
rupting the  purity  of  French  speech  in  his  own  time, 
with  a  warmth  that  would  no  doubt  have  reminded  Mo- 
liere himself  of  Alceste :  "  A  superficial  culture  which 
has  lost  the  sentiment  of  the  right  use  of  terms,  and  a 
need  of  over-refinement  which  wishes  to  innovate  at  any 
price,  such  are  the  principal  agents  in  the  corruption  of 
this  magnificent  language,  which  three  centuries  of  great 
writers  had  brought  to  a  degree  of  incomparable  perfec- 
tion. ...  I  read  recently  in  a  newspaper  that '  un  crime 
venait  de  s'accomplir  dans  des  conditions  d'atrocite 
inouie?  Can  you  imagine,  my  dear  friend,  the  mental 
state  of  a  man  who  can  write  such  a  phrase !  To  come 
to  such  a  pass  must  he  not  have  been  pretty  completely 
abandoned  by  both  gods  and  men  !  And  has  n't  every- 
body the  right  to  exclaim  in  the  speech  of  Voltaire  that 

i  Hid.,  20  July,  1863. 

3  See  Brunetiere's  reply,  La  langue  de Moliere  (Etudes  critiques,vnt85fS'). 


192  MODEKN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

there  are  not  enough  floutings,  not  enough  foolscaps, 
not  enough  pillories  in  France  for  such  rascallions." l 


Some  of  the  very  traits  in  Scherer,  however,  that  are 
unrepresentative  of  the  narrower  environment  make  him 
representative  in  a  larger  way.  "  Scherer,"  says  M.  Gre- 
ard,  "  belongs  to  the  small  number  of  those  who  will  bear 
witness  before  posterity  to  the  crises  that  human  thought 
traversed  in  the  nineteenth  century." 2  If  Scherer's 
life  is  thus  typical,  it  is  because  it  exhibits  with  special 
acuteness  the  central  conflict  of  the  century  between 
science  and  faith.  He  had  begun  by  granting  nothing 
to  the  new  critical  spirit,  by  a  belief  in  the  literal  inspi- 
ration of  the  Bible,  and  ended  by  granting  the  new 
spirit  everything.  The  creed  he  had  held  absolutely 
came,  with  his  acceptance  of  the  historical  method,  to 
seem  purely  relative ;  what  he  had  taken  to  have  outer 
reality  appeared  a  mere  emanation  of  the  mind,  not,  in 
short,  objective  but  subjective.  It  was  not  surprising 
that  Scherer  regarded  this  distinction  between  objective 
and  subjective  as  having  been  of  more  moment  to  the 
world  than  the  discovery  of  America.3 

Scherer's  use  of  this  and  similar  distinctions  suggests 
his  obligations  to  German  thought.  As  a  matter  of  fact 
he  was  one  of  those  who  did  the  most  to  make  certain 
aspects  of  this  thought  known  in  France  during  the 
second  half  of  the  century.  His  article  on  Hegel  in 
the  "Revue  des  Deux  Mondes  "  in  1861,  which  marked 
1  Etudes,  v,  379.  *  Edmond  Scherer,  4.  8  Etudes,  vra,  p.  xii. 


SCHERER  193 

his  emergence  as  a  critic,  was  probably  the  most  in- 
fluential he  ever  wrote.  The  essential  idea  which  he 
took  from  Hegel  and  other  Germans  was  that  of  de- 
velopment. "  The  universe,"  he  says  in  the  preface  to 
his  first  volume  of  literary  essays,  "  is  only  the  eternal 
flux  of  things ;  and  the  same  holds  of  the  true,  the  good 
and  the  beautiful  as  of  the  rest :  they  do  not  exist,  they 
are  made;  they  are  less  the  purpose  or  goal  towards 
which  humanity  tends  than  the  mobile  resultant  of  the 
efforts  of  all  men  and  all  centuries."  "  Hegel,"  he  wrote 
in  the  article  of  1861,  "  has  taught  us  the  respect  and 
intelligence  of  the  facts.  Through  him  we  know  that 
what  is  has  the  right  to  be.  .  .  .  Hence  a  powerful 
method  of  study  and  criticism.  .  .  .  We  no  longer  make 
the  world  over  in  our  image ;  on  the  contrary,  we  allow 
ourselves  to  be  modified  and  fashioned  by  it.  ...  In 
the  eyes  of  the  modern  savant  everything  is  true,  every- 
thing is  well  in  its  place ;  the  place  of  every  truth  con- 
stitutes its  truth.  The  structure  of  the  old  world  rested 
on  faith  in  the  absolute.  Religion,  ethics,  literature, 
everything  bore  the  stamp  of  this  notion.  Men  knew 
only  two  causes  — that  of  God  and  the  Devil ;  two  camps 
among  men,  the  good  and  the  wicked  ;  two  places  in 
eternity,  the  right  and  the  left  of  the  judge.  Error  was 
all  on  one  side ;  truth  all  on  the  other.  Nowadays  no- 
thing is  any  longer  for  us  either  truth  or  error ;  we  no 
longer  know  religion,  but  religions  ;  not  morality,  but 
manners ;  not  principles,  but  facts.  What  a  marvellous 
understanding  of  the  past  we  have  in  consequence  !  How 
it  lives  again  before  our  eyes !  The  affiliations  of  peoples, 


194  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

the  advance  of  civilizations,  the  character  of  different 
times,  the  genius  of  languages,  the  sense  of  mythologies, 
the  inspiration  of  national  poetries,  the  essence  of  reli- 
gions, are  so  many  revelations  due  to  modern  science. 
...  As  is  our  science  so  is  our  aesthetic.  It  prefers  to 
contemplate  and  study  rather  than  judge.  ...  It  has 
given  up  the  barren  method  which  consists  in  opposing 
one  form  of  beauty  to  another,  in  preferring,  in  exclud- 
ing. It  bears  with  everything.  It  is  vast  as  the  world, 
tolerant  as  nature.  .  .  .  It  is  of  the  very  essence  of  things 
that  a  truth  is  complete  only  in  so  far  as  its  contrary  is 
introduced  into  it ;  that  one  assertion  is  no  truer  than 
an  opposite  assertion  and  always  ends  in  a  contradiction, 
to  rise  afterwards  to  a  higher  conciliation ;  that  the  pre- 
sent fact  has  only  a  fugitive  reality ;  a  reality  that  con- 
sists in  its  disappearance  as  well  as  in  its  appearance,  a 
reality  that  is  produced  to  be  denied  as  soon  as  affirmed. 
It  is  therefore  not  enough  to  say :  everything  is  only 
relative;  we  must  add:  everything  is  only  relation.  The 
true  is  not  true  in  itself ;  there  is  no  definitive  truth.  .  .  . 
The  only -equitable  and  useful  judgment  you  can  pass 
upon  systems,  is  the  judgment  they  pronounce  upon 
themselves  by  their  transformations,"  etc. 

It  would,  in  short,  be  hard  to  imagine  a  more  thorough 
relativist  than  Scherer.  Truth  and  reality  for  him  are 
entirely  implicated  in  the  flux.  They  are  not  anterior  to 
the  facts  but  are  the  progressive  outcome  of  them.  This 
extremely  pluralistic  view  of  truth  associated  him  with  a 
certain  type  of  scientific  positivist  in  his  own  time  and 
would  to-day  associate  him  with  the  pragmatists.  If  he 


SCHERER  195 

had  lived  in  the  Middle  Ages  he  would  have  been  a 
strict  nominalist.  No  one  devoted  keener  logic  than  he 
to  proving  that  life  is  not  logical,  that  all  attempts  to 
unify  it  intellectually  are  vain.  The  absolute  in  this 
sense  is  a  metaphysical  illusion.  The  attempt  of  the  mind 
to  set  up  a  theory  of  itself  is  equally  illusory.  It  is  as 
though  a  man  should  look  out  of  a  window  in  order  to 
see  himself  pass  by  in  the  street. 

One  form  of  the  metaphysical  illusion,  as  it  seemed  to 
him,  was  the  proneness  to  erect  certain  words  into  a  sort 
of  absolute,  and  to  render  them  mystical  homage.  He 
assailed  this  illusion  not  only  in  its  past  forms,  but  in 
the  forms  it  was  assuming  in  his  own  day  (and  here  we 
have  an  additional  ground  for  his  unpopularity).  In  the 
preface  to  the  eighth  volume  of  his  "Etudes,"  sometimes 
called  his  literary  testament,  he  makes  an  attack  of  this 
kind  on  the  word  Humanity.  He  sees  in  this  word  merely 
"  one  of  those  abstractions  which  meet  our  incurable  needs 
for  mysticism."  We  have  a  family  and  city  and  friends 
and  kin,  but  that  does  not  suffice ;  we  widen  out  the  re- 
lationship which  is  already  unsubstantial,  until  we  embrace 
the  whole  genus  homo,  which  we  proceed  to  personify, 
speaking  of  it  only  with  emotion  and  raising  hymns  in  its 
honor.  "We  shed  ink  upon  the  altars  of  this  personifica- 
tion,—  ink  and  sometimes  blood.  .  .  .  In  the  great  ship- 
wreck of  belief,  we  have  carried  over  to  this  conception  all 
our  needs  of  faith  and  love.  Nay  more,  it  was  Comte  him- 
self, the  founder  of  positivism,  who  undertook  to  make  of 
Humanity  an  object  of  worship.  We  have  rid  the  world 
of  theology  and  metaphysics  and  yet  remain  the  sport  of 


196  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

a  word."  As  he  looks  over  the  races  of  the  world,  Scherer 
is  led  to  ask  irreverently  whether  the  Goddess  Humanity 
does  not  often  have  a  strange  resemblance  to  a  monkey. 
"  It  is  possibly  very  wrong  of  me  that  I  am  thus  consti- 
tuted. I  am  fundamentally  a  nominalist.  Humanity  means 
nothing  for  me.  Where  do  you  see  this  humanity?  Where 
do  you  find  it?  Even  among  men  and  women  I  meet, 
how  many  are  there  that  I  feel  no  need  to  know  more 
intimately!  I  cannot  wonder  enough  at  the  power  of 
abstraction  of  people  who  in  the  overflow  of  their  sympa- 
thies forget  the  ugly,  the  stupid  and  the  vulgar,  and 
leave  out  of  account  the  vicious,  the  vile  and  the  atrocious. 
You  would  n't  shake  hands  with  this  man :  nevertheless, 
he 's  a  brother.  You  send  him  to  jail,  you  cut  off  his 
head :  always  brother ! " 

Scherer  would  escape  from  the  mesh  of  illusion  in  which 
we  are  imprisoned  by  the  word.  He  would  get  rid  of  all 
illusions  and  gaze  on  the  truth  in  its  nakedness..  "It 
seems  to  me,"  he  says  in  his  Literary  Testament,  "  as  I 
look  back  upon  my  life  that  I  have  simply  experienced 
a  certain  passion  for  getting  at  the  bottom  of  things 
(voir  les  chases  dans  leurfond)"  But  perhaps  the  at- 
tempt to  get  at  the  bottom  of  things  in  this  sense,  that 
is,  to  see  them  stripped  of  all  their  veils  of  illusion,  is 
itself  an  intellectualist  error.  Illusion,  as  Joubert  says 
profoundly,  is  an  integral  part  of  reality.  If  you  leave  out 
illusion,  you  see  the  fact  or  "  law "  in  a  hard  isolation 
and  not  in  its  mysterious  interconnection  with  the  whole. 
In  this  way  you  arrive  at  the  false  disillusion  of  the  de- 
cadent who  sees  not  only  in  the  outer  world,  but  in  him- 


SCHERER  197 

self,  nothing  but  phenomena  and  phenomenal  relation- 
ships, who  has  no  countervailing  intuition  of  the  One  to 
oppose  to  his  perception  of  the  Many.  The  highest  wis- 
dom, according  to  Scherer,  is  illusion  that  knows  itself 
illusion ;  and  he  would  have  us  believe  that  there  is  a 
strange  and  horrible  joy  in  thus  recognizing  the  final 
inanity  of  all.1  But  we  have  the  testimony  of  Greard 
that  Scherer  never  seemed  so  sad  as  when  celebrating 
the  joys  of  disenchantment.2 

Scherer  reminds  us  almost  inevitably  here  of  Amiel, 
and  he  is  only  consistent  in  proclaiming  the  deep  wisdom 
and  sublime  poetry  of  Amiel's  speculations  about  illusion 
and  disillusion,  Maya  and  the  Great  Wheel  —  all  that 
portion  of  the  "  Journal  In  time  "  that  Arnold  so  shrewdly 
set  down  as  pathological.  Scherer,  however,  was  at  one 
with  Arnold  as  to  the  practical  unprofitableness  of  such 
speculations.  He  regarded  as  highly  beneficent  the  in- 
stincts that  keep  man  from  looking  too  fixedly  at  in- 
soluble problems.  "  We  must,"  he  says,  "  avoid  coming 
to  too  close  quarters  with  life.  It  is  a  slender  crust  over 
which  you  must  walk  without  bearing  down  too  hard. 
Hit  your  heel  into  it  and  you  make  a  hole  in  which  you 
will  disappear.  True  philosophy  has  never  consisted  in 
probing  all  problems,  but  often  on  the  contrary  in  elud- 
ing them.  We  are  skirting  the  abyss :  beware  of  vertigo." 
Scherer  did  instinctively  what  Arnold  regretted  Amiel 
did  not  do :  he  escaped  the  vertigo  of  the  abyss  by  turn- 
ing literary  critic. 

1  Etudes,  vn,  36.  *  Edmond  Scherer,  155. 


198  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ii 

Scherer  may  indeed  be  regarded  as  a  middle  term 
between  Amiel  and  Arnold.1  All  three  men  were  pre- 
occupied in  a  somewhat  similar  way  with  the  religious 
problem.  All  three  had  suffered  from  the  noblest  form 
of  the  malady  of  the  age,  the  feeling  of  emptiness  that 
ensues  upon  the  loss  of  faith,  the  desolateness  of  the 
man  who  is  suspended  between  two  worlds,  —  one  dead, 
the  other  powerless  to  be  born.  Though  Scherer  did 
not,  like  Amiel,  suffer  a  paralysis  of  the  will  as  the 
result  of  this  divided  allegiance,  he  exhibits  its  ravages 
in  other  ways  at  least  as  acutely.  At  twenty,  as  he  tells 
us,  he  had  undergone  conversion,  he  had  caught  a 
glimpse  of  "  that  ideal  of  a  pure  and  holy  life  which, 
when  it  has  once  appeared,  takes  possession  of  all  the 
powers  of  one's  being."  And  then  supervened  the  sci- 
entific conception  which  reduces  everything  to  natural 
history.  "  In  spite  of  its  protest,  religion  is  comprised, 
like  everything  else,  in  the  knowledge  of  nature.  That 
is  the  point  I  reached  at  forty."2  Arnold  had  not  con- 
ceded so  much  to  faith  at  twenty  as  did  Scherer,  and 
conceded  far  less  to  science  at  forty.  He  would  not, 

1  I  speak  later  of  Arnold's  tribute  to  Soberer.  He  must  in  turn  bave 
felt  satisfaction  wben  be  read  passages  like  tbe  following:  "C'est  un 
repos  d'ouvrir  les  livres  (de  M.  Arnold)  lorsqu'on  vient  de  lire  cenx  des 
grands  manie'ristes  dont  s'enorgueillit  si  a  tort  la  littcrature  de  nos  voi- 
sins  :  Carlyle  au  jargon  conscient,  voulu,  calculi;  Ruskiu  et  ses  affecta- 
tions de  profondeur,  sa  laborieuse  recherche  d'expression,  toutes  ces  poses 
e'tudie'es  d'un  charlatanisms  qu'on  regrette  de  voir  allie*  parfois  k  un  nit- 
rite re'el,  et  qui  constituent  un  pe'che'  contra  le  vrai  se*rieux  et  le  grand 
gout."  (Etudes,  vn,  5.) 

8  Etudes,  rx,  221. 


SCHERER  199 

like  Soberer,  have  lumped  together  as  subjective  every- 
thing that  did  not  conform  to  the  standards  of  scientific 
truth;  he  would  not,  for  example,  have  granted  that 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  subjective  in  the  same 
sense  as  Lamartine's  poetry.  To  Scherer's  contention 
that  religion  rentre  comme  tout  le  reste  dans  la  con- 
naissance  de  la  nature,  he  would  have  replied :  — 

"  Man  hath  all  which  nature  hath,  but  more, 
And  in  that  more  lie  all  his  hopes  of  good." 

Arnold's  view  of  life,  in  short,  was  not  entirely  stoical, 
but  at  least  partly  humanistic.  He  was  inferior  to  Scherer 
in  logical  vigor  and  breadth  of  knowledge,  but  superior 
to  him  in  instinctive  good  sense.  Then,  too,  he  was  con- 
soled, as  Scherer  was  not,  by  visitations  of  the  Muse. 
There  were  moments  when,  in  his  own  phrase,  he  breathed 
immortal  air,  though  he  never  mounts,  as  Tennyson  does 
at  times,  to  the  purely  religious  intuitions.  Scherer 
moved  freely  in  the  moral  world,  Joubert  would  have 
said,  "but  not  in  that  other  world  that  is  above  it." 
One  is  therefore  led  to  surmise  that  his  earlier  faith  was 
a  mixture  of  theology  and  romantic  religiosity.  It  is 
indeed  as  important  in  his  case  to  study  the  relation- 
ship to  Lamartine  as  it  is  in  the  case  of  Arnold  to 
study  the  relationship  to  Senancour.  Scherer  looks  on 
Lamartine  as  a  true  idealist;  which  means  in  practice 
that  he  confuses  religion  with  romantic  longing.  He 
contrasts  this  idealism  with  the  flat-footed  and  prosaic 
spirit  of  his  contemporaries  and  yet  concludes  that  his 
contemporaries  are  right  after  all.  The  faith  in  the  in- 
invisible  and  the  infinite  was  merely  an  incident  in  the 


200  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

romantic  youth  of  the  world,  with  its  ignorance  and  its 
illusion,  but  also  with  its  victorious  charm.  But  the 
world  has  matured  and  bid  adieu  to  its  youthful  dreams. 
The  net  result  of  the  effort  of  its  prime  will  be  an  in- 
creasing comfort  with  an  increasing  vulgarity.1 

Romantic  disillusion  thus  played  an  enormous  role 
in  Scherer's  conversion  to  scientific  positivism.  We  have 
seen  that  Sainte-Beuve's  attempt  to  rest  religious  faith 
on  treacherous  romantic  foundations  had  ended  in  a 
somewhat  similar  disillusion.  It  was  appropriate  there- 
fore that  Scherer  should  have  chosen  Sainte-Beuve  as 
his  master  when  he  broke  definitely  with  his  theological 
past,  and  that  Sainte-Beuve  should  have  been  the  first 
to  proclaim  Scherer's  intellectual  distinction.  Scherer 
not  only  had  a  genuine  cult  for  Sainte-Beuve  (he  always 
worked  with  his  bust  before  him),  but  he  was  in  some 
respects,  more  than  Taine  and  others  who  had  a  similar 
cult,  a  genuine  disciple.  Like  Sainte-Beuve  he  had  the 
thoroughness  and  accuracy  that  we  associate  with  the  best 
type  of  investigator,  but,  like  Sainte-Beuve  and  unlike 
many  modern  scholars,  he  loved  letters  for  their  own  sake 
and  not  merely  as  a  corpus  vile  for  investigation.  Sainte- 
Beuve  seemed  to  him  a  vanishing  type,  one  of  the  last 
of  the  humanists  (soyons  les  derniers  des  delicats,  as 
Sainte-Beuve  himself  had  said).  "And  now  we  must 
take  leave  of  him,"  Scherer  wrote  immediately  after 
Sainte-Beuve's  death,  "  take  leave  of  this  lucid  intelli- 
gence, this  marvellous  writer,  this  charming  talker,  this 
indulgent  friend.  .  .  .  Happy  if  the  melancholy  antici- 
1  Etudes,  ix,  287. 


SCHERER  201 

pations  natural  at  such  a  moment  do  not  come  true. 
Happy  if  the  death  of  a  man  who  has  occupied  so  great 
a  place  in  our  literature  is  not  at  the  same  time  the  end 
of  a  literary  epoch;  if  delicacy  and  taste,  deprived  to- 
day of  their  last  representative,  are  not  destined  to  dis- 
appear with  him :  if  the  royalty  of  letters  is  not  destined 
like  other  royalties  to  give  place  to  general  mediocrity 
and  violent  procedures.  I  frequently  had  the  impres- 
sion that  Sainte-Beuve  himself,  towards  the  end,  felt 
that  he  was  a  stranger  in  the  midst  of  the  new  tenden- 
cies j  and  it  is  inevitable,  perhaps,  when  you  lose  a  man 
like  him,  to  imagine  that  everything  is  ended  when 
everything  is  only  being  transformed."1 

In  a  sense  Scherer's  literary  criticism,  though  it  has 
a  strong  moral  and  philosophical  tinge,  is  truer  to  the 
type  than  Sainte-Beuve's ;  it  does  not,  like  his,  melt  al- 
most insensibly  into  biography  and  history  and  science. 
Moreover  Scherer  resembled  Arnold  rather  than  Sainte- 
Beuve,  in  being  interested  in  the  general  more  than  in 
the  particular.  The  difference  in  temper  between  Sainte- 
Beuve  and  Scherer  is,  of  course,  striking.  "  What  he  has 
not  as  a  critic,"  says  Arnold  of  Scherer,  "  is  Sainte- 
Beuve's  elasticity  and  cheerfulness.  He  has  not  that 
gaiety,  that  radiancy,  as  of  a  man  discharging  with  de- 
light the  very  office  to  which  he  was  born,  which  in  the 
*  Causeries '  make  Sainte-Beuve's  touch  so  felicitous,  his 
sentences  so  crisp,  his  effect  so  charming."  Scherer  is  less 
light-hearted  as  a  critic  than  Arnold  himself,  who  has 
even  been  accused  at  times  of  jauntiness.  The  reason  is 
1  Etudes,  nr,  111. 


202  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

perhaps  that  Arnold  had  found  an  outlet  for  his  roman- 
tic disillusion  in  his  poetry.  Sainte-Beuve  had  not  only 
effected  a  similar  purgation  of  the  malady  of  the  age 
in  his  own  verse,  but  there  were  other  reasons  why  he 
found  the  process  of  adjustment  to  the  new  order  less 
painful  than  did  Scherer.  Sainte-Beuve  was  afflicted  as 
a  humanist  and  honnete  homme,  by  certain  modern  de- 
velopments, but  did  not  retain,  after  the  loss  of  his  ro- 
mantic religiosity,  an  undue  moral  severity  (quite  the 
contrary).  Furthermore  he  had  in  him  a  strong  plebeian 
element  that,  in  spite  of  his  radical  distrust  of  human  na- 
ture, inclined  him  at  times  towards  the  humanitarian 
hope.  Scherer  was  not  merely  a  stern  moralist,  but  tem- 
peramentally an  aristocrat,  who  drew  back  with  a  proud 
patrician  gesture  (potius  mori  quam  fcedari)  from 
that  growing  democratic  commonness  in  which  intel- 
lectually he  acquiesced. 


m 


This  clash  between  the  head  and  the  heart  which  ap- 
pears so  often  in  Scherer  and  so  poignantly,  is  pre- 
cisely what  gives  to  his  life  that  representative  value  of 
which  M.  Greard  speaks.  At  one  moment  Scherer  ex- 
ults over  the  doctrine  of  relativity,  at  another  he  ex- 
claims, "  No,  I  am  not  made  for  an  epoch  of  universal 
transformation  like  ours ;  my  sympathies  are  with  the 
past ;  and  yet  I  feel  that  there  is  in  human  affairs  a  cer- 
tain declivity  that  you  cannot  reascend.  And  so  I  see 
myself  carried  away  by  my  intellectual  convictions  to- 
wards a  future  that  inspires  in  me  neither  interest  nor 


SCHERER  203 

confidence."  People  were  naturally  disconcerted  when 
they  saw  Scherer  stand  forth  intellectually  as  a  modern 
of  moderns  and  at  the  same  time  turn  away  in  disdain 
from  everything  distinctively  modern.  Most  men  have 
given  their  allegiance  to  the  new  order  not  by  a  process 
of  cool  reasoning,  but  by  an  act  of  faith.  Scherer,  how- 
ever, showed  the  same  "  sad  lucidity  of  soul "  in  deal- 
ing with  the  new  faith  that  he  had  shown  in  dealing 
with  the  old.  We  have  already  seen  how  he  disposes  of 
the  word  Humanity ;  he  is  no  less  merciless  in  expos- 
ing the  illusions  that  have  clustered  round  the  word 
Progress.  So  far  from  making  a  religion  of  progress, 
so  far  from  believing  that  the  world  is  moving  towards 
"  some  far-off  divine  event,"  he  believes  rather,  as  we 
have  seen,  that  it  is  moving  towards  general  mediocrity, 
with  an  increase  of  material  comfort  for  the  masses.  In- 
dustrial and  scientific  progress  he  grants  is  possible, 
since  each  new  invention  or  discovery  becomes  the  point 
of  departure  for  further  conquests.  The  error  begins 
when  we  transfer  what  is  true  of  the  practical  and  pos- 
itive order  to  the  world  of  moral  values ;  when  we  sup- 
pose that  society  increases  in  uprightness,  equity,  mod- 
eration, modesty,  delicacy  of  feeling  by  a  necessary 
evolution  and  an  automatic  development.  And  this 
error  comes  in  turn  from  another  which  is  the  con- 
fusion of  comfort  with  happiness,  whereas  comfort  is 
at  most  but  one  of  the  conditions  of  happiness.  Happi- 
ness is,  above  all,  a  state  of  the  soul,  so  that  you  may 
be  happy  with  few  enjoyments,  and  miserable  in  the  lap 
of  luxury.  Rightly  understood,  therefore,  progress  can 


204  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

assure  the  happiness  of  no  one,  still  less  promise  that 
of  mankind.  Progress  may  even  work  counter  to  happi- 
ness which  is  a  product  of  wisdom,  and  wisdom  in  turn 
presupposes  an  intellectual  culture  more  refined  than  is 
compatible  in  all  appearances  with  the  levelling  process 
of  democracy.1 

Democracy,  as  Scherer  uses  the  term,  means  of  course 
not  the  love  of  a  well-ordered  liberty,  but  what  it  has 
meant  practically  in  modern  France,  the  passion  for 
equality.  We  can  possibly,  as  I  have  pointed  out,  see  the 
working  of  heredity  in  his  own  estimate  of  the  relative 
value  of  freedom  and  equality.  He  saw  an  ironical  con- 
trast between  the  efforts  that  had  been  made  to  bring 
about  democracy  of  the  French  type  and  the  resultant 
dead  level  of  platitude.  "  So  be  it.  The  world  at  this 
rate  will  resemble  some  day  the  plain  of  Saint-Denis. 
And  to  think  how  many  outcries  and  writings  it  will 
have  cost,  how  much  ink  and  blood,  enthusiasm  and 
sacrifices,  to  realize  this  ideal !  "  The  future  of  human- 
ity, he  surmises,  will  be  something  like  a  bee-hive  or  ant- 
hill,—  regularity,  uniformity,  platitudinous  happiness, 
life  less  everything  that  makes  life  worth  while.2  Euro- 
pean society  seems  to  him  destined  to  push  on  in  the 
pathway  of  narrow  and  superficial  logic  until  this  logic 
is  shattered  against  the  very  nature  of  things,  against 
the  inequalities  of  strength  and  worth  that  distinguish 
men,  against  the  instincts  and  needs  that  create  private 
property,  against  the  necessity  that  is  imposed  upon 
society  to  organize  itself  in  order  to  live,  and  to  this 

1  Etudes,  vm,  pp.  yiii-ix.  2  Etudes,  v,  317. 


SCHERER  205 

end  to  accept  the  necessary  subordinations.1  Republi- 
can France  with  its  dreams  of  equality  is  more  Catholic 
than  it  imagines  since  it  is  still  engaged  in  the  quest  of 
the  absolute.  It  has  concentrated  upon  a  chimera  all 
the  powers  of  idealism  that  formerly  found  expression 
in  religion.2  "  Our  generation  is  pursuing  a  mirage 
vainer  than  that  of  the  desert,  absolute  equality  and 
universal  felicity. " 3  "  Let  us  not  forget  that  the  masses 
are  idealistic.  They  refuse  to  recognize  the  most  thor- 
oughly established  facts  when  they  themselves  are  the 
victims  of  them.  They  are  accustomed  in  the  simplicity 
of  their  political  ignorance  to  consider  institutions  as 
capable  of  remedying  everything,  human  nature  as 
capable  of  adjusting  itself  to  all  experiments.  There  has 
thus  grown  up  little  by  little  a  social  situation  singu- 
larly critical."4 

Since  the  masses  are  necessarily  idealistic,  the  only 
hope  would  seem  to  be  to  oppose  to  the  chimeras  of  the 
pseudo-idealists  a  true  idealism.  All  Scherer  himself  has 
to  oppose  to  these  chimeras  is  a  cold  disillusion. 

IV 

With  such  a  view  of  democracy,  Scherer,  so  far  from 
believing  in  progress,  evidently  inclined  to  the  opposite 
belief.  Towards  the  end  especially  he  was  haunted  by 
the  idea  of  decadence.  He  was  prone  to  bestow  almost 
exaggerated  praise  upon  writers  who,  in  the  midst  of 
the  growing  commonness,  still  displayed  delicacy  and 

1  Etudes,*,  240.  3  Ibid.,  55. 

8  Ibid.,  19.  *  Ibid.,  274. 


206  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

reserve,  even  if  these  qualities  were  not  accompanied  by 
sufficient  strength  —  writers,  for  example  like  Doudan, 
Fromentin,  Montegut,  Weiss.  He  cites  the  enormities 
of  Zola  as  an  example  of  the  influence  of  the  mob  on 
literary  standards,  and  as  we  have  already  seen,  dis- 
covers a  similar  symptom  in  what  is  known  nowadays 
as  la  crise  dufranqais.  "  It  is  possible,"  he  says,  "that 
all  these  pollutions  are  only  a  passing  effect  of  the  trend 
towards  equality,  of  a  levelling  process  that  has  sub- 
merged only  for  a  time  the  delicacy  of  men's  minds  and 
the  polish  of  their  manners."1  "But  if  this  were  not 
so,  if  democracy  really  meant  the  abolishment  of  what 
used  to  be  called  the  scholar  and  gentleman  (honnete 
homme)  one  would  have  reason  to  ask  what  can  result 
from  an  art  without  decency  and  a  society  without 
shame."  "  Former  literatures  that  perished  yielded  in 
part  to  the  shock  of  barbarians.  Is  that  the  fate  in 
store  for  us,  and  will  democracy  play  the  role  of  the 
barbarians?"2  He  expresses  a  doubt  whether  French 
literature  can  long  maintain  itself  in  such  an  extreme 
of  debauchery  and  imbecility. 

Scherer  protests  as  a  humanist  against  this  cheapening 
and  lowering  of  literature,  but  his  humanism,  like  that 
of  Sainte-Beuve  or  that  of  any  one  whose  own  philo- 
sophy does  not  rise  above  the  naturalistic  level,  is  too 
much  a  matter  of  taste  and  not  enough  a  matter  of 
standards  and  discipline.  "  Taste,"  he  says, "  is  toil  that 
conceals  itself,  and  we  applaud  only  ostentatious  arti- 
fice. It  is  delicacy,  and  we  worship  strength.  It  is  meas- 

1  Etudes,  x,  330.  2  Etudes,  ix,  347. 


SCHERER  207 

ure,  and  we  prostrate  ourselves  before  everything  that 
is  unmeasured.  Formerly  the  pencil  was  never  light 
enough,  now  it  gouges  a  hole  through  the  paper.  Ex- 
pression is  no  longer  addressed  to  the  spirit,  but  to  the 
senses.  The  greatest  writer  is  the  one  who  has  at  his 
disposition  the  widest  and  most  daring  vocabulary.  M. 
Zola  speaks  like  a  man  convinced  that  he  has  the  public 
with  him ;  nay,  more,  like  a  man  who  is  convinced  that 
he  is  inaugurating  a  new  art.  Unhappily  I  am  not  far 
from  thinking  so  too.  I  expressed  a  belief  when  Sainte- 
Beuve  died  that  something  was  ending  with  him.  That 
something  was  literature  in  the  old  sense,  the  preoccupa- 
tion with  what  is  noble  and  elevated,  fine  and  delicate,  the 
quest  for  truth  in  thought,  and  measure  in  expression  ; 
in  short,  what  has  been  called  hitherto  literary  taste 
and  the  art  of  writing.  All  that  appeared  to  me  deeply 
compromised,  and  I  confess  that  what  has  taken  place 
since  has  not  contributed  to  make  me  change  -my  opin- 
ion. Literature  is  in  a  way  to  disappear,  or  if  you  pre- 
fer, to  be  transformed.  Language  is  changing  visibly. 
There  is  still  orthography  in  books  and  newspapers  be- 
cause there  are  still  compositors  to  put  it  there,  but 
there  is  no  longer  any  grammar.  As  for  the  choice  of 
subjects,  people  prefer  violent  ones  and  get  what  they 
desire.  Highly  spiced  dishes  are  needed  to  awaken  the 
coarse  senses  of  the  masses,  the  jaded  palates  of  the 
over-refined,  the  intellectual  apathy  of  all;  and  numer- 
ous writers  are  found  to  provide  the  necessary  stimu- 
lants. All  this  is  proclaimed  progress,  the  literature  of 
the  future.  As  to  the  future,  that  is  possible ;  I  know 


208  MODERN  FKENCH  CRITICISM 

nothing  about  it.  But  progress?  That  is  precisely  the 
point  at  issue." 

Scherer  sums  up  his  worst  apprehensions  in  the  phrase : 
Nous  allons  a  V  americanisme?  Certain  of  the  perversions 
against  which  he  directs  his  diatribes  have  plainly  very 
little  to  do  with  democratic  commonness,  the  baleful 
process  of  Americanization.  There  is  surely  a  difference 
between  the  lack  of  distinction  that  may  fairly  be  asso- 
ciated with  a  certain  type  of  democracy  and  the  perver- 
sions of  over-refinement,  though  both  presuppose  a  break- 
ing down  of  the  standards  of  the  honnete  homme.  The 
perversions  of  over-refinement  should  be  connected  rather 
with  the  general  literary  development  of  the  century, 
especially  with  the  romantic  movement.  Scherer's  atti- 
tude towards  the  romantic  movement  needs  rather  careful 
defining.  He  himself,  as  I  have  tried  to  show,  is  closely  re- 
lated to  one  side  of  this  movement,  to  the  elegiac  and 
emotional  side  that  appears,  for  example,  in  the  poetry 
of  Lamartine.  But  there  is  another  side  of  the  movement 
that  is  not  primarily  elegiac  and  emotional,  but  pictorial 
and  descriptive,  a  side,  according  to  Scherer,  entirely 
different  from  the  other.  We  may  grant  him  that  the  two 
sides  are  distinct  but  not  that  they  are  radically  sepa- 
rated. At  any  rate  his  sympathy  for  romantic  writers 
diminished  in  exact  proportion  as  they  ceased  to  express 
that  infinite  longing  of  the  heart  that  he  associated  with 
religion,  and  as  they  became  pictorial.  He  has  only  dis- 
approval for  the  more  advanced  forms  of  romantic  word 
painting,  that  would  have  language  overstep  its  natural 

1  Etudes,  vii,  194-95.  *  Ibid.,  iv,  22. 


SCHERER  209 

boundaries  even  at  the  risk  of  being  emptied  of  its 
intellectual  content.  Description  seemed  to  him  to  over- 
top thought  in  Hugo,  and  he  grants  him  at  best  per- 
functory praise.  For  Gautier,  who  approaches  still  closer 
to  descriptive  virtuosity,  he  has  a  disdain  that  he  does 
not  attempt  to  conceal.  Of  all  writers  that  ever  lived 
Gautier  was  "  the  most  foreign  to  any  lofty  conception 
of  art  as  well  as  to  any  virile  use  of  the  pen."  *  How 
can  one  fail  to  be  struck,  says  Scherer,  at  the  place  de- 
scription has  taken  in  contemporary  letters!  "When 
you  hear  a  page  in  a  book  praised,  or  you  are  told  of 
a  newcomer  that  he  has  talent,  you  may  be  sure  in 
advance  that  this  kind  of  virtuosity  is  meant.  The 
manifest  reason  is  that  a  writer  may  be  brainless  and 
yet  endowed  with  the  eye  that  sees  forms  and  the  hand 
that  reproduces  them."  2 

Scherer,  however,  reserves  his  supreme  contempt  for 
the  writers  who  not  only  reduce  literature  to  the  quest 
of  sensation  but  of  morbid  sensation  at  that.  Now  among 
the  writers  of  this  kind  who  connect  the  older  romanti- 
cism with  the  so-called  decadent  movement,  Baudelaire 
is  probably  the  chief.  Baudelaire,  and  the  cult  of  Baude- 
laire, seem  to  Scherer  to  sum  up  everything  in  the  age 
that  tended  towards  degeneracy.  Whenever  he  touches 
on  this  topic  he  becomes  vitriolic.  "Baudelaire,"  he 
says,  "  gave  me  the  feeling  of  decadence,  and  revealed 
to  me  the  nature  of  it.  I  had  always  supposed  it  was  an 
empty  word  by  which  old  men  condemned  works  foreign 
to  their  habits.  I  had  said  to  myself  that  everything  is 

1  Etudes,  vra,  pp.  zxi-xzii.  a  Ibid.,  pp.  xix-xx. 


210  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

relative;  that  every  period  has  its  language  and  litera- 
ture; that  this  language  and  literature  are  good  by  the 
very  fact  that  they  express  the  thoughts  of  men  at  a 
moment  in  the  life  of  society.  But  no,  there  is  in  the 
human  spirit  an  old  age  as  well  as  a  youth;  there  is 
senility  after  virility,  a  moment  when  the  intelligence 
weakens,  speech  grows  thick  and  forms  become  distorted ; 
a  time  when  instead  of  being  beautiful,  supple,  and 
strong,  one  becomes  ugly,  driveling  and  impotent.  To 
question  this  fact  you  would  have  to  begin  by  abolish- 
ing the  distinction  between  beauty  and  ugliness.  It  is 
true  that  is  just  what  the  Baudelaires  are  busy  doing." 
"When  once  in  the  arts  you  begin  to  pursue  sensation, 
you  want  sensation  at  any  price.  After  beauty,  ugli- 
ness ;  after  the  shapely,  the  misshapen.  If  we  can't 
charm  you,  we  can  make  you  shudder.  .  .  .  The  same 
thing  happens  as  with  drunkards,  who  in  order  to  ex- 
cite their  jaded  palates  gulp  down  raw  spirits ;  as  with 
the  Marquis  de  Sade,  who  seasoned  voluptuousness  with 
cruelty.  And  there  is  no  reason  why  all  this  should  end. 
The  terrible  once  exhausted,  you  arrive  at  the  disgust- 
ing. You  paint  unclean  objects.  You  linger  over  them  ; 
you  wallow  in  them.  But  this  rottenness  itself  grows 
rotten.  This  decomposition  engenders  a  fouler  decompo- 
sition, until  finally  there  remains  an  indescribable  some- 
thing that  no  longer  has  a  name  in  any  language — and 
that  is  Baudelaire."  l  He  concludes,  that  "  Baudelaire  is 
a  sign  not  merely  of  decadence  in  literature,  but  of  a 
general  lowering  in  intelligence.  What  is  grave,  as  a 
1  Etudes,  TV,  284. 


SCHERER  211 

matter  of  fact,  is  not  that  a  man  has  been  found  to 
write  four  volumes  like  his,  but  that  such  a  man  should 
have  a  reputation  and  admirers  and  even  disciples ;  that 
we  should  take  him  seriously;  that  I  myself  should  be 
busied  in  writing  an  article  about  him."  * 

One  is  inclined  to  smile  when,  after  such  passages, 
Scherer  says  that  he  cannot  understand  those  who  would 
discuss  literary  preferences  or  who  proceed  by  predilec- 
tions and  aversions.2  It  is  true  that  in  this  matter  of 
critical  standards  he  appeals  at  times  from  the  philoso- 
phy of  the  flux,  in  part  to  common  sense  and  in  part  to 
tradition.  He  is  willing  to  admit "  neither  an  aesthetic  ab- 
solute nor  the  equal  competency  of  all  judges.  Neither 
so  high  nor  so  low  ;  neither  the  ideals  of  Plato  nor  the 
anarchy  of  individual  feelings.  Now  that  the  absolute 
has  escaped  us  we  are  not  to  suppose  that  everything 
becomes  arbitrary.  Good  judges  have  at  all  times  ad- 
mired certain  masterpieces  and  there  are  corruptions 
that  no  society  or  literature  can  tolerate  under  penalty 
of  ceasing  to  be." 3 

If  Scherer  is  not  so  flexible  and  comprehensive  as 
Sainte-Beuve,  if,  as  has  been  charged,  he  frequently 
shows  bias  and  partiality,  the  fault  lies  less  in  the  ex- 
cess of  his  philosophy  and  logic  than  in  his  moral  se- 
verity, a  severity  that  often  has  a  somewhat  Alceste 
flavor.  In  other  words,  in  spite  of  his  disavowals  he  is 
more  or  less  subject  to  temperamental  predilections  and 
aversions.  Both  as  a  humanist  and  relativist  he  is  on 
his  guard  against  the  extreme  and  the  sectarian, against 

1  Etudes,  iv,  289.       a  Ibid.,  x,  334 ;  v,  66,  etc.      •  Ibid.,  x,  329. 


212  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

holding  any  view  too  absolutely.  He  protests  repeatedly 
against  the  logical  exclusiveness  and  intolerance  to 
which  the  French  mind  has  always  been  prone  and 
which  seemed  to  him  especially  common  in  his  own 
time.  He  complains  of  his  "  role  of  isolation  in  this  age  of 
universal  fanaticism.  The  whole  of  literature  is  divided 
nowadays  into  sects,  each  one  of  which  writes  on  its 
banner :  Out  of  our  ranks,  no  salvation.  The  romanti- 
cists are  as  exclusive  as  the  realists,  the  Parnassians  as 
narrow  as  the  romanticists.  I  sometimes  wonder  what 
has  become  of  the  scholar  and  gentleman,  in  the  seven- 
teenth-century sense,  who,  according  to  La  Rochefou- 
cauld, does  not  pride  himself  on  anything." l  There  may 
still  be  half  a  dozen  persons  left,  he  estimates,  strangers 
to  the  horrible  mania  of  certainty  that  you  encounter 
everywhere  in  our  time,  who  are  not  so  fierce  in  their 
likes  and  dislikes,  sensitive  to  force  but  still  more  to 
perfection,  and  not  feeling  themselves  obliged  to  de- 
spise Racine  because  they  admire,  Shakespeare,  or 
Shakespeare  because  Racine  charms  them.  "  What  scorn 
M.  Zola  would  feel  for  one  of  these  men  if  he  chanced 
to  meet  him.  And  yet  let  him  make  no  mistake,  it  is 
men  of  this  kind  who  in  the  long  run  will  be  his 
judges." 2 

v 

Scherer's  natural  severity  appears  not  merely  in  his 

attitude  towards  Zola  or  Baudelaire,  but  in  his  treatment 

of  the  most  illustrious  names.  No  critic  is  farther  from 

a  flabby  appreciativeness.    We  read  with  curiosity  his 

1  Etudes,  vn,  171.  2  Ibid.,  172. 


SCHERER  213 

essays  on  some  of  the  great  reputations  to  see  what  is 
going  to  survive  of  them  after  they  have  undergone 
the  scrutiny  of  one  so  naturally  austere  and  so  free  from 
merely  conventional  admirations.  Arnold  has  made 
familiar  to  English  readers  two  essays  of  this  kind, 
those  on  Milton  and  Goethe.  The  essay  on  Goethe 
sprang,  like  the  essay  on  Moliere,  from  the  Protestant 
side  of  Scherer's  nature,  from  his  inability  to  acquiesce 
passively  in  any  orthodoxy  as  such.  He  saw  in  the  Ger- 
man cult  of  Goethe  a  proof  of  the  assertion  that  man 
cannot  get  along  without  an  authority  into  the  hands 
of  which  he  may  abdicate  his  judgment.  "  The  Ger- 
mans have  long  since  exhausted  the  keenness  of  their 
criticism  on  God  the  Father  and  God  the  Son.  They 
have  left  nothing  standing  of  the  infallibility  of  the 
church," 1  but  they  have  got  even,  he  goes  on  to  say, 
by  their  blind  worship  of  Goethe.  "  The  biographers 
have  traced  all  his  steps,  collected  all  his  conversations, 
chronicled  all  his  loves,  written  the  lives  of  all  the  per- 
sons who  had  any  relation  with  him,  and  they  are  deter- 
mined not  to  stop  before  they  have  established  what  the 
great  man  was  doing  at  every  moment  of  his  existence. 
For  the  works  of  Goethe,  of  course,  still  more  pains  are 
taken  to  be  complete.  His  slightest  quatrains,  his  slight- 
est notes  are  hunted  down  ;  his  apothecary  bills  are 
printed;  the  parings  of  his  nails  and  the  hairs  of  his 
beard  are  collected."  2  The  real  merits  of  Goethe  have 
been  exaggerated  by  the  superstitious  admiration  of  a 
"  nation  that  did  not  have  any  literature  before  him  and 

1  Etudes,  vm,  52.  *  Ibid.,  53. 


214  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

has  not  had  much  since."  l  Such  a  sentence  must  have 
been  peculiarly  exasperating  to  the  German  reader  and 
perhaps  Scherer  was  not  altogether  sorry  that  it  should 
be.  We  feel  at  times  in  the  essay  the  smart  of  the 
Franco-Prussian  War.  Yet  he  ends  by  exalting  Goethe 
as  the  representative  modern  man.  He  not  only  pro- 
claims his  international  importance,  but  gives  the  right 
reasons  for  it. 

The  mixture  of  intellectual  keenness  and  moral  sever- 
ity in  Scherer  is  equally  apparent  in  what  he  says  of  the 
other  great  figure  of  the  modern  age,  Napoleon.  He 
admits  that  Napoleon  had  all  the  secondary  virtues.  "  He 
was  no  less  admirable  as  an  organizer  than  as  a  soldier. 
He  was  economical,  laborious,  possessed  of  the  most  di- 
verse aptitudes.  He  had  the  knowledge  of  men  and  the 
art  of  making  use  of  them.  He  has  not  been  surpassed 
as  a  negotiator.  He  knew  how  to  profit  by  a  success ; 
how  to  intimidate,  dissimulate,  circumvent.  No  one,  in 
a  word,  ever  carried  further  the  purely  intellectual  fac- 
ulties. But  this  marvellous  intelligence  only  made  more 
sensible  in  Napoleon  the  absence  of  true  creative  genius. 
When  you  try  to  render  an  account  to  yourself  of  what 
he  wanted  after  all,  of  what  he  did,  of  what  he  left  be- 
hind him,  you  find  nothing ;  he  had  no  general  guiding 
idea,  he  acted  without  purpose,  he  lived  at  random ;  he 
moved  feverishly  in  the  void.  He  saved  France,  but 
only  to  allow  it  to  fall  lower  than  it  was  before.  .  .  . 
He  engaged  in  that  barbarous  and  insensate  thing,  war 
for  the  sake  of  war.  He  undertook  conquests  after  the 

1  Etudes,  vi,  350. 


SCHERER  215 

fashion  of  the  ancient  despots  of  the  Orient.  He  dreamed 
of  the  empire  of  Charlemagne,  perhaps  that  of  Alexan- 
der. That  keen  glance  which  penetrated  the  secrets  of 
diplomacy,  which  foresaw  with  superhuman  sagacity  all 
the  movements  of  a  campaign,  did  not  see  what  the 
meanest  clerk  in  the  foreign  office  might  have  told  him 
—  that  he  was  headed  for  the  abyss.  Napoleon  ventured 
to  believe  in  the  duration  of  his  empire.  He  flattered 
himself  that  he  should  transmit  it  to  his  son ;  or  rather 
he  believed  nothing,  thought  nothing.  He  advanced  at 
random,  from  victory  to  victory,  from  conquest  to  con- 
quest, after  the  fashion  of  the  gambler  who  at  every 
throw  of  the  dice  doubles  his  stake,  being  no  longer 
able  to  dispense  with  the  excitement  of  the  camp,  for- 
getting in  his  sublime  and  mad  diversions  that  the  life, 
the  honor  of  nations,  the  safety  of  his  country  were 
involved.  Napoleon  is  of  all  men  the  one  who  ex- 
hibits most  clearly  the  two  extremes  of  grandeur  and 
littleness.  He  is  genius  in  the  service  of  madness." l 
Note  that  Scherer's  repulsion  for  Napoleon  was  mainly 
a  moral  repulsion.  "  He  is  one  of  those  southern  na- 
tures," he  says,  "  in  whom  the  moral  man  is  simply  ab- 
sent. That  is  why  he  is  at  once  so  great  and  so  small, 
so  astonishing  and  so  vulgar." 

"  Does  not  criticism,"  asks  Scherer,  "  consist  above 
all  in  comprehending  ?  " 2  No,  one  might  reply,  but  in 
judging.  It  should  be  evident  by  this  time,  however, 
that  no  one  ever  needed  less  than  Scherer  to  be  reminded 
of  the  critic's  judicial  function ;  that  he  is  remarkable, 

1  Etudes,  1, 141-142.  «  Etudes,  l,  322. 


216  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

on  the  contrary,  for  the  intrepidity  and  severity  of  his 
judgments.  Some  might  even  see  in  his  readiness  "to 
deal  damnation  round  the  land,"  a  survival  of  his  theo- 
logical past.  This  disaccord  between  his  instinct  and 
theory  is  flagrant.  For  if,  as  he  says,  duty  is  phenome- 
nal l  and  morality  relative,2  like  everything  else,  on  what 
basis  outside  of  those  temperamental  aversions  and  pre- 
dilections that  he  disavows  will  he  justify  his  severity  ? 
He  is  more  preoccupied,  again,  with  the  whole  ques- 
tion of  decadence  than  befits  a  philosopher  of  the 
flux.  Kenan  is,  perhaps,  a  truer  relativist  when  he  says 
that  "decadence  is  a  word  that  must  be  definitively 
banished  from  the  philosophy  of  history."  3 

The  intimate  contradiction  in  Scherer's  being  comes 
out  in  what  he  says  of  Darwin  as  it  had  come  out  in  his 
earlier  dealings  with  Hegel.  "  When  you  have  once  ac- 
quired," he  says,  "a  scientific  way  of  thinking,  it  no 
longer  occurs  to  you  to  ask  why  the  universe  is  what  it 
is.  The  fact  is  accepted  in  its  sovereignty.  .  .  .  There 
is  no  real  but  the  real,  and  Darwin  is  its  prophet.  That 
is  the  declivity  down  which  the  human  reason  is  slipping 
at  this  moment  at  the  risk  of  leaving  on  the  way  many 
of  the  things  that  have  constituted  its  strength  and 
joy." 4  It  is  an  eloquent  testimony  to  the  force  of  natu- 
ralism in  the  nineteenth  century  that  a  man  who  so 
craved  fixed  standards  as  Scherer,  should  yet  have  bowed 
his  neck  beneath  its  yoke  in  spite  of  the  rebellion  of  his 
heart,  and  admitted  that  the  only  reality  is  change. 

1  Etudes,  x,  126.  a  Etudes,  vi,  209. 

»  Avenir  de  la  science,  73.  4  Etudes,  vi,  124. 


SCHERER  217 

Naturalism  pushed  to  this  point  always  involves  some 
confusion  of  the  planes  of  being,  some  subordination  of 
what  is  higher  in  man  to  what  is  lower,  and  on  the  the- 
oretic side,  some  measure  of  that  metaphysical  illusion 
against  which  he  was  so  on  his  guard.  He  is,  however, 
far  less  sectarian  in  his  naturalism  than  his  fellow  stoic, 
Taine.  His  literary  criticism  is  not  compromised  by  any 
excess  of  scientific  zeal,  and  this  should  count  in  its 
favor  in  the  long  run.  There  is  too  much  stoical  bleak- 
ness about  it,  too  much  sheer  disillusion,  for  it  ever  to 
win  the  popularity  that  it  missed  during  Scherer's  life. 
But  the  serious  student  will  continue  to  consult  it,  not 
only  because  of  the  light  it  throws  on  certain  spiritual 
crises  of  the  nineteenth  century,  but  for  its  rare  combin- 
ation of  accurate  and  cosmopolitan  information  with 
austere  sincerity,  vigorous  handling  of  ideas,  judicial 
courage,  and  "  a  passion  for  getting  at  the  bottom  of 
things." 


VIII 

TAINE 

TAINE,  who  had  a  positive  dislike  for  Scherer,  was  at 
one  with  him  in  the  heartiness  of  his  homage  to  Sainte- 
Beuve.  We  may  judge,  however,  from  Taine's  article  on 
Sainte-Beuve  that  the  book  he  had  planned  on  the  same 
subject  would,  if  he  had  lived  to  write  it,  have  given  a 
somewhat  distorted  image  of  the  master.  This  article 
recalls  Sainte-Beuve's  theory  of  literary  reputation  which 
is  itself  only  another  application  of  his  favorite  theory  of 
amour-propre.  When  a  man  survives  in  the  memory  of 
others,  according  to  Sainte-Beuve,  they  do  not  see  and 
admire  him  as  he  really  was ;  they  merely  see  and  ad- 
mire themselves  in  him.  Viewed  from  Taine's  special 
angle,  Sainte-Beuve  appears  chiefly  as  a  precursor  of 
Taine.  All  Taine  claims  to  have  done  is  to  have  coordi- 
nated and  systematized  the  scientific  method  that  is  every- 
where latent  in  the  "  Lundis."  Seeing  in  him  above  all 
the  naturalist,  Taine  pronounces  him  one  of  the  five  or 
six  chief  servants  of  the  human  spirit  in  the  nineteenth 
century.  Taine's  eagerness  to  pass  as  the  continuer  of 
Sainte-Beuve  is  in  curious  contrast  to  Sainte-Beuve's 
own  anxiety  to  mark  the  points  wherein  he  and  Taine 
diverge. 

i 

The  differences  between  the  two  men  are,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  much  more  striking  than  the  similarities.  Sainte- 


TAINE  219 

Beuve,  as  I  have  said,  is  above  all  a  particularizer.  He 
is  open  to  the  charge  of  being  excessively  prudent  intel- 
lectually, of  not  coming  out  into  the  open  often  enough 
with  the  bold  and  direct  affirmation.  Taine,  on  the  other 
hand,  pushes  his  passion  for  generalization  to  the  point 
of  temerity.  He  not  only  loves  to  think,  as  he  tells  us, 
but  to  "  think  quickly."  It  is  to  be  feared  that  he  thought 
far  too  quickly  on  many  subjects,  and  then  clung  too 
tenaciously  to  his  first  conclusions.  Perhaps  he  might 
have  been  less  tenacious  if  he  had  been  more  discursive 
and  less  logical  in  his  thinking.  But  he  possessed  in  the 
highest  degree  that  gift  for  abstract  reasoning  which  is 
so  closely  related  to  the  mathematical  gift  that  Pascal 
termed  it  V esprit  de  geometrie.  Indeed  Pascal's  famous 
distinction  between  V esprit  de  geometrie  and  I' esprit  de 
finesse  constantly  occurs  to  one  in  comparing  Sainte- 
Beuve  and  Taine.  No  critic  ever  surpassed  Sainte-Beuve 
in  the  esprit  de  finesse,  the  art  of  rendering  life  in  its 
infinite  complexity,  without  preconceived  system,  sans 
tant  de  methode,  as  he  phrases  it.  It  is  with  books  as 
with  grapes ;  you  lose  the  finest  flavors  that  may  be  ex- 
tracted from  them  if  you  subject  them  to  too  severe  a 
pressure.1  Taine,  on  the  contrary,  is  for  squeezing  out  the 
very  last  drop  of  what  seems  to  him  general  truth  from 
anything  that  has  once  gone  into  his  critical  winepress. 
Before  becoming  a  recluse  Sainte-Beuve  had  had  a 
many-sided  contact  with  the  world.  "As  for  me,"  he 
writes  in  one  of  his  earlier  letters,  "I  go  into  society 
and  I  observe." 2  Taine  began  too  much  as  Sainte-Beuve 

1  Chateaubriand,  I,  234.  a  Correspondance  inedite,  224. 


s 

220  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ended.  Sainte-Beuve  himself  was  struck  by  a  loss  of 
balance  in  the  youth  of  the  generation  to  which  Taine 
belonged.  Many  of  the  youths  of  this  generation  might 
have  said  of  themselves  with  Renan,  that  they  suffered 
from  a  sort  of  encephalitis.  We  may  indeed  define  the 
malady  that  afflicted  these  representative  young  men  of 
the  middle  of  the  century,  as  a  frenzied  intellectualism. 
The  congestion  of  all  the  powers  of  the  personality  in 
the  brain  is  apparent  in  Taine  in  a  very  literal  sense. 
When  only  a  boy  he  had  leeches  applied  to  his  head  at 
the  time  of  the  general  examinations.  His  intellectual 
high-pressure  was  so  continuous  in  later  life  that  he  was 
subject  to  periods  of  complete  prostration,  in  one  case 
lasting  for  two  years. 

To  see  life  so  purely  from  the  angle  of  the  intellect  is 
to  have  an  extreme  and  one-sided  view.  But  Taine  did 
not  shrink  back  instinctively  from  the  extreme  and  one- 
sided. Psychologically  no  more  important  question  can 
be  asked  about  a  man  than  whether  he  is  a  mediator  or 
an  extremist.  The  contrast  between  Taine  and  Sainte- 
Beuve  is  in  this  particular  especially  striking.  We  have 
already  seen  this  contrast  in  Taine' s  cult  of  the  master 
faculty  without  any  humanistic  counterpoise.  He  revels 
in  a  rampant  naturalism.  The  violence  and  excess  of 
Balzac,  which  so  repels  Sainte-Beuve,  exercises  upon 
Taine  a  positive  fascination.  The  Essay  on  Balzac  was 
perhaps  more  influential  as  a  naturalistic  manifesto  than 
the  "  Preface  de  Cromwell "  had  been  as  a  manifesto  of 
romanticism.  Balzac,  according  to  Taine,  is  a^ type'  of 
the  enormously  expansive  personality,  so^exuberant  and 


TAINE  221 

forceful  that  he  is  incapable  of  self-control.  The  same 
exuberant  force  is  found  in  his  Creations.  You  would 
not  care  to  encounter  such  characters  in  real  life,  but  in 
literature  they  are  admirable.  If  you  were^walking  in~ 
the  country  you  would  rather  meet  a  lamb  than  a  lionf 
but  if  the  lion  is  behind  bars  he  is  more  interesting  than 
the" iaTfib.  Art  is  the  equivalent  of  the  bars.  Artists 
should  therefore  exhibit  to  us  wild  beasts  as  a  relief  from 
the  platitude  of  everyday  prose.  This  Balzac  does  to 
perfection.  We  are  not  interested  in  his  men  and  women 
as  such.  "  They  are  merely  the  pedestals  of  a  statue 
which  is  their  master  passion." 1  This  passion  has  eaten 
up  their  humanity.  Hulot  is  not  a  man  but  a  tempera- 
ment. The  master  impulse  develops  in  Philippe  Bridau 
until  there  is  "no  longer  anything  human  left  in  his 
nature  "  —  nothing  but "  the  inhuman  and  sinister  glitter 
of  a  bronze  statue."2  Grandet  is  impressive  because 
his  passion  has  come  to  such  a  pass  that  "  it  has  cut  off 
in  him  the  very  root  of  humanity  and  pity."3  Like  Shake- 
speare, Balzac  paints  monomaniacs  of  every  species. 
Taine  notes  with  satisfaction  that  one  of  his  short  stories 
contains  no  fewer  than  seven  monomaniacs. 

A  writer  in  the  London  "  Spectator "  remarked  re- 
cently that  Bernard  Shaw  lacks  the  sense  of  the  human. 
It  is  evident  from  the  passages  I  have  quoted  that  Taine 
suffered  from  a  similar  lack.  In  his  "  English  Literature  " 
he  sets  Madame  Marneffe  (the  very  character  that  in- 
spired a  special  aversion  in  Sainte-Beuve)  above  Becky 
Sharp,  apparently  because  Becky  Sharp  still  remains  a 

1  Essais  de  critique,  etc.,  147.  a  Ibid.,  138.  •  Ibid.,  144. 


222  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

human  being,  albeit  a  very  perverse  one.  Madame  Mar- 
neffe,  on  the  other  hand,  is  the  inevitable  outcome  of 
her  environment  and  temperament  and  so  is  not  amen- 
able to  ordinary  human  or  moral  standards.  "  She  is 
perfect  in  her  kind,  like  a  dangerous  and  splendid  horse 
that  you  admire  and  fear  at  the  same  time."  l 

Taine's  lack  of  sense  of  the  human  has  played  him 
some  evil  turns,  especially,  it  would  seem,  in  his  treat- 
ment of  the  Renaissance.  The  Renaissance  was  an  age 
of  great  naturalistic  expansion,  but  also  in  important  re- 
spects a  humanistic  age.  All  Taine  sees  in  the  period  is 
the  "  complete  and  violent  expansion  of  nature." 2  As 
for  the  art  and  literature  of  the  time  it  is  an  unusually 
well-stocked  menagerie;  there  is  a  refreshing  absence 
of  tame  domestic  animals,  and  wild  beasts  a-plenty.  "  We 
can  hear  through  the  plays,  as  through  the  history  of 
the  time,  their  savage  growling ;  the  sixteenth  century  is 
like  a  den  of  lions."  The  dehumanizing  of  Shakespeare 
that  he  had  begun  in  the  Essay  on  Balzac  he  completes 
in  the  "  English  Literature."  He  cannot  find  epithets 
enough  to  describe  the  immeasurable  unrestraint  of  hu- 
man nature  as  it  appears  in  Shakespeare  and  the  other 
dramatists  of  his  time.  We  see  in  all  these  dramatists 
"genuine  and  primitive  man  beside  himself,  aflame,  the 
slave  of  his  animal  impulses,  and  the  plaything  of  his 
dreams,  entirely  given  up  to  the  present  moment,  com- 
pacted of  lusts,  contradictions  and  follies ;  who,  with 
outbursts  and  quivers,  with  cries  of  voluptuousness  and 
anguish,  rolls  consciously  and  deliberately  down  the 

1  Lit.  ang.,  v,  122.  «  Ibid.,  u,  1. 


TAINE  223 

steep  slopes  and  jagged  points  of  his  precipice."  l  If 
Shakespeare  had  written  a  psychology  he  would  have 
said  that  man  is  a  "  nervous  machine  governed  by  tem- 
perament, disposed  to  hallucinations,  carried  away  by 
unbridled  passions,  essentially  unreasonable,  a  mixture 
of  animal  and  poet,  having  feeling  as  his  virtue,  imagin- 
ation as  mainspring  and  guide,  and  conducted  at  random 
by  the  most  highly  determined  and  complex  circum- 
stances to  pain,  crime,  madness  and  death."  2 

In  Taine's  somewhat  decadent  cult  for  energy,  even 
when  displayed  in  madness  and  crime,  we  can  trace  in 
him  as  in  various  other  respects  the  influence  of  Stendhal. 
In  fact  we  might  establish  the  wideness  of  the  gap  be- 
tween Taine  and  Sainte-Beuve,  not  merely  by  comparing 
them  directly,  but  by  studying  the  respective  influen- 
ces upon  them.  Most  of  the  men  who  exercised  a  major 
influence  upon  Taine  either  did  not  act  upon  Sainte- 
Beuve  at  all,  or  were  positively  antipathetic  to  him.  The 
authors  that  Taine  affected  during  his  formative  years 
were  those  who  made  either  intellectually  or  emotionally 
for  a  pure  naturalism.  His  special  partiality  for  Balzac 
and  Stendhal  is  perhaps  to  be  explained  by  the  fact  that 
they  combined  both  the  intellectual  and  emotional  as- 
pects of  the  movement.  They  had  the  cult  of  pure  spon- 
taneity in  the  Rousseauistic  sense,  along  with  the  scien- 
tific and  deterministic  explanation  of  it.  One  should  also 
note  Taine's  predilection  for  Alfred  de  Musset  (especi- 
ally in  the  poems  of  passion)  and  Michelet,  possibly  the 
two  romantic  writers  who  let  themselves  go  most  f uri- 

1  Lit.  ang.,  u,  48.  *  Ibid.,  u,  259. 


224 

ously.  The  closing  pages  of  the  "English  Literature,"  in 
which  Taine  exalts  Alfred  de  Musset  above  Tennyson 
on  the  ground  of  his  superior  spontaneity,  are  almost  too 
familiar  to  mention. 

On  the  scientific  side  Taine' s  naturalism  is  indebted 
to  England  and  Germany  as  well  as  France.  He  is  under 
important  obligations  to  Stuart  Mill  (who  himself  re- 
flects in  some  measure  the  influence  of  Comte)  and  in 
general  to  the  minutely  experimental  and  utilitarian 
school  of  Englishmen,  the  school  that  would  confine 
itself  to  facts,  and  their  interrelationships.  "  Little 
facts,"  Taine  declares  in  a  celebrated  sentence,  "  care- 
fully chosen,  important,  significant,  abundantly  circum- 
stanced and  minutely  noted,  such  is  to-day  the  sub- 
stance of  all  knowledge." l  But  after  all  he  craved  a 
more  ample  theory.  He  wished  to  pass,  as  he  could  not 
in  this  English  thinking,  "  from  the  accidental  to  the 
necessary,  from  the  relative  to  the  absolute,  from  appear- 
ance to  truth." 2  And  for  this  intellectual  absolute  he 
turned  to  Germany.  The  reading  of  Hegel's  "  Logic  " 
was  one  of  the  great  events  of  his  youth.  He  describes 
it  as  "  the  monster  I  spent  six  months  digesting  at 
Nevers." 3  As  to  the  way  these  English  and  German  ele- 
ments combined  in  his  thinking,  we  may  let  Taine  speak 
for  himself.  After  saying  that  "  experiment  and  ab- 
straction constitute  between  them  all  the  resources  of 
the  human  spirit,"  he  adds  :  "  One  directs  practice ;  the 
other,  speculation.  The  first  leads  one  to  look  on  nature 
as  a  body  of  facts,  the  second  as  a  system  of  laws ;  em- 

1  Intelligence,  I,  4.  a  Lit.  ang.,  v,  410.  8  Vie  et  cor.,  u,  30. 


TAINE  225 

ployed  by  itself,  the  first  is  English  ;  employed  by  itself, 
the  second  is  German."  He  goes  on  to  say  that  France 
may  profitably  undertake  the  task  of  mediating  between 
the  two  schools.  "  We  broadened  out  English  ideas  in 
the  eighteenth  century ;  we  may  in  the  nineteenth-cen- 
tury give  precision  to  the  ideas  of  Germany.  Our  busi- 
ness is  to  temper,  correct  and  complete  the  two  spirits 
by  each  other,  to  fuse  them  into  one,  to  express  them 
in  a  style  that  everybody  understands  and  thus  give 
them  universal  currency." l 

Taine  got  from  Hegel  and  the  Germans  the  idea  of 
development,  especially  the  development  according  to 
fixed  laws,  of  great  bodies  of  men  —  in  other  words,  a 
philosophy  of  history.  Sainte-Beuve  had  small  liking 
for  this  attempt  as  it  appears,  for  example,  in  a  writer 
like  Guizot,  to  impose  an  intellectual  order  upon  the 
facts  of  the  past.  We  can  never,  he  says,  slash  too  deeply 
into  any  possible  philosophy  of  history.  He  is  dis- 
trustful of  systematic  general  views,  of  "  those  trumpet 
blasts,"  as  he  calls  them, "  which  coordinate  the  facts,  line 
them  up  instantly,  and  make  them  march  in  good  order 
as  though  under  a  banner."2  Now  Taine  is  attracted 
by  the  very  side  of  Guizot  that  seemed  so  doubtful  to 
Sainte-Beuve.  His  philosophy  of  history  is  not  the  same 
as  Guizot's,  but  he  believes  in  a  philosophy  of  history, 
and  is  indeed  less  interested  in  art  and  literature  for 
their  own  sakes,  than  as  aids  towards  such  a  philosophy. 
Moreover,  in  his  way  of  reaching  his  results  he  shows 
himself  more  akin  to  Guizot  than  to  the  Germans.  We 

1  Lit.  ang.t  v,  416.  *  N.  Lundis,  vi,  79. 


226  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

should  be  justified  by  Taine's  own  method  in  seeking  to 
explain  as  a  racial  proclivity  the  special  type  of  logi- 
cality that  we  find  in  his  mind  as  well  as  in  Guizot's. 

ii 

We  might  indeed  accept  Taine's  method  more  readily 
if  it  applied  to  every  one  as  well  as  it  does  to  himself. 
He  may  be  studied  more  than  most  men  as  a  product  of 
race,  environment  and,  above  all,  historical  moment; 
and  we  can  see  in  him,  more  clearly  than  in  most  men, 
how  these  various  factors  combined  to  determine  the 
nature  and  exercise  of  his  master  faculty.  M.  Saisset, 
one  of  Taine's  teachers  at  the  Normal  School,  writes  a 
very  eulogistic  note  on  his  pupil,  but  adds  :  "  His  prin- 
cipal fault  is  an  excessive  taste  for  abstraction."  A  year 
earlier  M.  Vacherot,  another  of  his  teachers,  wrote  in 
the  course  of  a  similar  note :  "  He  is  over-fond  of  for- 
mulae to  which  he  too  frequently  sacrifices  reality,  with- 
out suspecting  the  fact,  to  be  sure,  for  he  is  perfectly  sin- 
cere." l  Taine's  dominant  trait,  here  so  happily  charac- 
terized, is  also  the  dominant  trait  of  the  French  as  com- 
pared with  other  peoples.  This  passion  for  pure  logi- 
cality manifests  itself  in  the  scholastic  philosophy,  mani- 
fests itself  in  Descartes,  who  attacked  scholasticism, 
manifests  itself  in  Taine,  who  assailed  the  excess  of 
raison  raisonnante  in  the  political  Cartesians  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  Taine  sees  a  survival  of  the  old 
Scandinavian  sea-rover  in  young  Englishmen  who  hunt 
bear  in  the  Rocky  Mountains  or  elephants  in  South 

1  Vie  et  cor.,  1, 123. 


TAINE  227 

Africa.  We  have  at  least  as  good  ground  for  seeing 
the  survival  of  a  primordial  racial  impulse  in  his  own 
love  of  formulae. 

The  two  other  main  elements  in  Taine's  work,  which 
may  be  defined  as  the  love  of  little  facts  and  the  love 
of  local  color,  are  subordinated  to  his  love  of  formulae. 
He  has  pages  of  word-painting  worthy  of  Gautier,  but 
we  suddenly  discover  that  the  word-painting  is  not  for 
its  own  sake,  as  it  would  be  with  Gautier,  but  is  in  the 
service  of  a  demonstration.  He  accumulates  little  facts 
again  in  enormous  numbers,  but  the  formula  presides 
over  their  selection.  We  should  add  with  M.  Vacherot 
that  this  choice  is  unconscious,  for  Taine,  after  all,  had 
a  mind  of  admirable  probity.  But  with  this  proviso  we 
may  say  of  Taine,  as  Aristotle  said  of  the  Pythagoreans, 
that  where  there  was  "  any  slight  misfit  between  the 
logic  and  the  facts  some  gentle  pressure  would  be  ap- 
plied "  to  bring  the  facts  into  accord  with  the  system  ;  or 
we  may  apply  to  Taine  what  Dr.  Johnson  asserted  with 
less  justice  of  Hurd  :  that  he  "is  one  of  a  set  of  men 
who  account  for  everything  systematically ;  for  instance, 
it  has  been  a  fashion  to  wear  scarlet  breeches ;  these 
men  would  tell  you  that,  according  to  causes  and  effects, 
no  other  wear  could  at  that  time  have  been  chosen." 
In  much  this  way,  Taine  undertakes  to  prove  that  in  an 
ascetic  period  such  as  certain  moments  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  it  was,  according  to  causes  and  effects,  impossible 
for  any  individual  to  have  and,  above  all,  to  express  a 
cheerful  view  of  life, 

Taine's  constant  pursuit,  then,  of  the  master  trait, 


228  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

whether  of  a  race  or  an  epoch  or  an  individual,  is  in 
reality  the  pursuit  of  the  master  formula.  "  The  diffi- 
culty for  me  in  an  investigation,"  he  writes,  "  is  to  find 
some  characteristic  and  dominant  trait  from  which 
everything  may  be  deduced  geometrically,  in  a  word  to 
have  the  formula  of  the  thing.  It  seems  to  me  that  the 
formula  of  Livy  is  as  follows :  an  orator  who  becomes  an 
historian."  And  so  Taine  proceeds  to  write  a  book  on 
Livy,  in  which  the  Roman  historian  and  his  works  in  all 
their  complexity  are  forced  into  this  logical  mould.  For 
the  ruling  passion  with  Taine  is  not,  as  it  is  with  Sainte- 
Beuve,  one  passion  among  other  and  more  or  less  inde- 
pendent passions,  but  "  like  Aaron's  serpent,  swallows 
up  the  rest,"  or  rather  it  commands  them  by  a  sort  of 
mathematical  and  mechanical  necessity.  Taine  puts  this 
interdependence  of  faculties  under  the  patronage  of 
science,  under  the  name  of  the  law  of  mutual  depend- 
encies.1 "  Just  as  in  an  animal  the  instincts,  teeth,  limbs, 
bony  framework,  muscular  apparatus  are  bound  together 
in  such  wise  that  a  variation  in  one  of  them  determines 
in  each  of  the  others  a  corresponding  variation,  and 
just  as  a  skilled  naturalist  can,  from  a  few  fragments, 
reconstruct  by  reasoning  almost  the  whole  body," 2  even 
so  an  historian  who  knew  one  part  of  a  civilization  might 
half  predict  the  other  parts.  You  can  thus  find  the  com- 
mon formula  of  phenomena  apparently  as  distinct  as  a 
flower-bed  at  Versailles,  a  philosophic  and  theologic  rea- 
soning of  Malebranche,  a  precept  of  versification  by 

1  See  especially  preface  to  Essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire. 
8  Lit.  ang.,  Int.,  I,  p.  yi. 


TAINE  229 

Boileau,  a  law  of  Colbert  on  mortgages,  a  courtier's 
compliment  at  Marly,  a  sentence  of  Bossuet  on  the  di- 
vine omnipotence.  They  are  simply  different  ways  in 
which  the  "  ideal  and  general  man  "  of  that  age  ex- 
pressed his  dominant  faculty.1 

Taine's  emphasis  on  the  master  faculty  is  due  not 
merely  to  his  love  of  the  master  formula,  but  as  I  have 
already  pointed  out,  in  speaking  of  his  relation  to  Bal- 
zac, to  his  love  of  an  unchecked  spontaneity.  In  study- 
ing the  forms  that  his  love  of  Rousseauistic  spontaneity 
assumes  we  can  once  more  apply  his  own  method  to  him- 
self, and  trace  in  him  the  effect  of  environment,  especi- 
ally of  early  environment.  "  I  was  born,"  he  says,  "  in 
the  forest  of  Arden  and  I  love  it ;  and  yet  I  have  of  it 
only  childish  memories.  But  the  river,  the  meadow,  the 
woods,  one  has  seen  in  his  first  walks,  leave  in  the  depths 
of  the  soul  an  impression  that  the  rest  of  life  completes 
and  does  not  disturb.  Everything  that  you  imagine  later 
takes  its  rise  there ;  it  even  seems  that  everything  is  there, 
and  that  the  full  day  can  never  equal  the  dawn." 2 
Throughout  his  life  Taine's  imagination  was  haunted  by 
the  woods,  and  at  Paris  he  often  suffered  a  veritable  nos- 
talgia for  them,  and  in  general  for  the  forms  of  outer 
nature.  He  has  been  called  a  poet-logician.  But  perhaps 
more  is  needed  to  make  a  poet  than  a  gift  for  rendering 
vividly  the  forms  of  outer  nature.  His  style  does,  how- 
ever, combine  to  a  singular  extent  logic  with  local  color. 
It  is  at  once  and  to  an  almost  paradoxical  degree  ana- 

1  Essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire,  pp.  xiv-xr. 
9  Derniers  Essais,  etc.,  43. 


230  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

lytical  and  pictorial,  abstract  and  impressionistic.  In  a 
curious  self-examination  that  was  found  among  his 
papers,  he  raises  the  question  whether  the  secret  war- 
fare between  these  two  elements  in  his  style  was  not  re- 
sponsible for  the  fatigue  he  felt  in  composing.1  Perhaps 
it  is  due  to  the  final  predominance  of  analysis  in  his  mind 
that  he  falls  short  in  his  descriptive  passages  of  the 
highest  effects  of  the  word-painter  :  he  does  not  give  us 
so  much  complete  vision  as  intense  segments  of  vision. 

To  the  predominance  of  analysis  is  also  due  the  fact 
that  the  total  effect  of  Taine's  style  is  not,  in  spite  of 
the  profuse  imagery,  one  of  imaginative  freedom.  One 
suspects  that  if,  in  Johnson's  phrase,  he  was  for  making 
mind  mechanical,  it  was  because  his  own  mind  was  some- 
what mechanical.  His  style  lacks  inner  give  and  elasti- 
city. It  reflects  a  materialistic  age  in  that  it  conveys  the 
impression  of  sheer  power  rather  than  of  grace  and 
measure.  Scherer  says  that  he  can  never  read  Taine 
without  thinking  of  "  those  gigantic  steam  trip-hammers 
that  strike  repeated  and  noisy  blows.  Under  this  con- 
stant impact  the  steel  is  bent  and  fashioned.  Everything 
gives  you  the  feeling  of  force.  But  you  must  add  that 
you  are  stunned  by  so  much  noise  and  that,  after  all,  this 
style,  which  has  the  solidity  and  glitter  of  metal,  has 
also  at  times  something  of  its  heaviness  and  hardness." 2 

One  of  Taine's  unfulfilled  projects  was  to  write,  as  a 

companion  volume  to  his  treatise  on  the  "Intelligence," 

a  treatise  on  the  "  Will  "  ;  but  we  may  be  sure  he  would 

have  identified  the  will  with  energy.  "  Our  mind  is  con- 

1  Vie  et  cor.,  n,  261.  *  Etudes,  vr,  135. 


TAINE  231 

structed  as  mathematically  as  a  watch,"  he  says  in  the 
essay  on  Michelet.  "  The  movement  which  the  main- 
spring (that  is,  the  master  faculty)  communicates  to  the 
parts  of  the  mechanism  escapes  the  control  of  our  will  be- 
cause it  is  our  will  itself"  In  other  words,  he  has  no 
belief  in  that  other  form  of  spontaneity,  that  inner  check 
that  may  restrain  the  elan  vital  and  direct  it  to  some 
human  end.  He  worships  vital  impulse  as  much  as  M. 
Bergson,  only  he  would  subordinate  it  strictly  (and  herein 
of  course  he  differs  from  M.  Bergson)  to  mechanical 
law.  He  has  endless  comparisons  to  suggest  how  inevit- 
ably human  faculties  unfold  and  how  little  they  are  a 
matter  of  individual  choice  and  volition.  At  one  time  he 
compares  man  to  the  lower  animals ;  his  only  aim  as  an  his- 
torian, he  says,  is  to  be  a  student  of  moral  zoology.1 
"  You  may,"  he  says  again,  "  consider  man  as  an  ani- 
mal of  superior  species  who  produces  philosophies  and 
poems  about  as  silkworms  produce  their  cocoons  and 
bees  their  cells." 2  He  is  going  to  study  the  transforma- 
tion of  France  by  the  French  Revolution  as  he  would 
the  "  metamorphosis  of  an  insect." 3 

But  normally  he  inclines  to  a  form  of  spontaneity 
even  more  inevitable  and  instinctive  than  that  of  the 
insect  —  that,  namely,  of  the  plant.  Sainte-Beuve  had 
described  himself  in  one  of  his  naturalistic  moods,  as  a 
botanist  of  the  human  spirit.4  Taine  takes  up  this  meta- 
phor and  applies  it  with  a  persistency  and  literalness 
that  would  never  have  occurred  to  Sainte-Beuve.  Both 

1  Origines,  La  Revolution,  m,  Preface.  *  La  Fontaine,  Preface. 

*  Origines,  Ancien  regime,  Preface,  *  See  p.  145. 


232  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

as  a  scientific  and  as  a  sentimental  naturalist  (whose 
memory  was  haunted  by  the  forest  of  Arden)  he  found 
his  account  in  his  unending  comparisons  of  human  be- 
ings to  trees  and  plants.  The  word  for  which  he  has  the 
greatest  predilection  is  probably  sap  (seve).  What  most 
delights  him  is  the  vigorous  rising  of  the  sap  in  the 
human  vegetation.  Like  Stendhal  he  admires  Italy  be- 
cause it  is  there  that  the  human  plant  grows  most  luxu- 
riantly. We  are  going  to  see  in  his  pages  the  whole 
genius  of  Shakespeare  "  unfold  before  us  like  a  flower." 
He  does  not  feel  that  he  is  lowering  Shakespeare  by  thus 
comparing  him  to  a  plant.  We  could  not  ask  anything 
better  than  to  be  like  trees.  "  These  great  trees  make 
you  great ;  they  are  happy  and  calm  heroes ;  you  become 
so  by  contagion  on  seeing  them.  You  feel  like  crying 
out  to  them :  You  are  beautiful  and  powerful  oaks,  you 
are  strong,  you  enjoy  your  force  and  your  luxuriant 
foliage." l 

This  aspiration  towards  a  sort  of  vegetative  felicity  is 
thoroughly  Rousseauistic.  It  must  indeed  be  clear  by  this 
time  how  closely  one  whole  side  of  Taine  is  related  to 
romanticism.  To  understand  this  relationship  we  shall 
have  to  study  the  influence  of  the  moment  and  thus  com- 
plete our  application  of  his  own  method  to  himself.  We 
need  to  interpret  his  work  with  reference  to  the  open 
and  avowed  materialism  of  the  Second  Empire,  just  as 
we  need  to  interpret  Sainte-Beuve's  earlier  work  with  re- 
ference to  the  pseudo-idealism  of  1830.  I  have  already 
pointed  out  that  this  pseudo-idealism  met  utter  discom- 
1  Thomas  Graindorge,  253. 


TAINE  233 

fiture  in  1848.  It  had  become  clear  that  the  real  world 
at  all  events  would  have  none  of  it.  And  so  Taine  gave 
over  the  real  world  to  the  dominion  of  the  literal  fact, 
and  set  out  to  rear  on  this  foundation  the  new  cult  of 
science.  At  the  same  time,  however,  that  he  is  a  scien- 
tific positivist,  he  is  a  disillusioned  romanticist,  and  his 
whole  work  is  pervaded  by  the  bitter  flavor  of  this  dis- 
illusion, —  by  the  sense  of  the  ironical  contradiction  be- 
tween the  desires  of  the  heart  and  the  actual.  Nature, 
for  Taine  and  the  men  of  his  time,  was  no  longer  the 
kind  mother  that  she  had  been  for  Wordsworth  and 
Lamartine  (la  nature  est  la  qui  f  incite  et  qui  t'aime), 
but  a  collection  of  inexorable  laws.  The  most  definite 
personification  of  nature  in  Taine  is  the  following,  taken, 
to  be  sure,  from  his  most  cynical  book,  the  "  Life  and 
Opinions  of  Thomas  Graindorge  " :  "  Towards  the  end 
of  his  life  Louis  XI  had  a  collection  of  young  pigs  that 
he  had  dressed  up  as  nobles,  bourgeois  and  canons. 
They  had  been  cudgelled  into  obedience,  and  danced  in 
this  equipage  before  him.  The  unknown  lady,  called 
Nature,  does  the  same ;  probably  she  is  a  humorist ;  only, 
when  by  dint  of  hard  lashings  she  has  got  us  to  fill  our 
roles  and  has  laughed  abundantly  at  our  grimaces,  she 
sends  us  to  the  pork-butcher  and  the  salting-tub."1 

The  romanticists  not  only  believed  in  the  goodness  of 
nature,  but  in  the  natural  goodness  of  man  even  though 
he  is  commonly  perverted  by  society.  "  Man,"  says  Taine, 
on  the  contrary,  "  has  canine  teeth  like  the  dog  and  fox, 
and  like  the  dog  and  fox  he  buried  them  at  the  begin- 

1  Thomas  Graindorge,  pp.  ix-x. 


234  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ning  in  the  flesh  of  his  fellows.  His  descendants  slaugh- 
tered one  another  with  stone  knives  for  a  bit  of  raw 
fish."  The  equivalent  still  goes  on  under  the  surface  of 
our  modern  conventions.1  Life  was  never  so  hideous,  he 
says  of  one  period  of  the  Renaissance,  and  this  hideous- 
ness  is  the  truth.  Thus  Taine's  head  finds  its  truth  and 
reality  in  an  order  that  is  abhorrent  to  his  heart.  The 
instinct  of  the  heart  is  to  escape  from  such  a  reality  into 
a  pays  des  chimeres.  This  is  what  he  calls  creating  for 
yourself  an  alibi :  One  such  alibi,  as  we  have  already 
seen,  is  to  lose  yourself  in  aesthetic  contemplation  of  the 
forms  of  outer  nature.  Another  way  of  creating  an  alibi 
is  to  study  history.  "  Through  this  gate  you  enter  into 
revery.  All  opium  is  unhealthy ;  it  is  prudent  to  take  it 
only  in  small  doses  and  from  time  to  time.  Since  Wer- 
ther  and  Rene  we  have  taken  too  much  of  it,  and  are 
taking  it  in  heavier  doses  every  day ;  consequently  the 
malady  of  the  age  has  been  aggravated,  and  in  music, 
painting  and  politics  a  number  of  symptoms  prove  that 
the  derangement  of  reason,  imagination,  sensibility  and 
nerves  is  on  the  increase.  Among  all  the  drugs  that  give 
us  at  our  will  factitious  absence  and  forgetf ulness,  his- 
tory is,  I  believe,  the  least  dangerous." 2  A  third  way 
of  creating  an  alibi  is  by  music.  Jouez  du  Beethoven. 
The  whole  point  of  view  may  be  defined  as  positivism 
mitigated  by  romantic  revery. 

1  Thomas  Graindorge,  267.  a  Derniert  cssais,  etc.,  226. 


TAINE  235 

in 

Taine  recognized  that  he  and  his  contemporaries  could 
never  hope  for  more  than  a  half  recovery  from  the  mal- 
ady of  the  age,  which  was  a  part  of  their  legacy  from 
the  preceding  generation.  "  We  shall  attain  to  truth," 
he  says,  "  but  not  to  calm.  All  that  we  can  cure  at  this 
moment  is  our  intelligence ;  we  have  no  hold  on  our 
feelings."1  But  he  hoped  that  in  their  descendants  this 
warfare  between  head  and  heart  might  cease,  and  that 
they  would  give  themselves  up  without  qualms  or  re- 
grets to  scientific  positivism.  It  was  in  fact  as  a  scien- 
tific positivist  that  Taine  was  enormously  influential  on 
the  men  of  his  own  and  the  following  generation.  Be- 
fore carrying  further,  therefore,  our  study  of  his  atti- 
tude towards  nature  and  human  nature,  we  shall  need  to 
consider  more  carefully  certain  aspects  of  this  positiv- 
ism. Taine  himself  has  taken  pains  in  one  of  his  essays 
to  define  it  and  show  in  what  respects  it  is  hostile  to  the 
old  idealism :  "  Its  first  rule  in  the  search  for  truth  is  to 
reject  all  extraneous  authority,  to  yield  only  to  direct 
evidence,  to  wish  to  touch  and  to  see,  to  have  faith  in 
testimony  only  after  examination,  discussion  and  veri- 
fication ;  its  greatest  aversion  is  for  affirmations  without 
proof,  which  it  calls  prejudices,  and  for  unquestioning 
belief  which  it  calls  credulity";  it  opposes  reason  to 
faith,  nature  to  revelation,  experiment  and  induction  to 
a  priori  formulae.  The  struggle  between  these  rival 
views  of  life,  which  has  been  in  progress  since  the  Re- 
1  Lit.  ang.t  rv,  423. 


236  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

naissance,  is  what  has  been  called  the  warfare  of  science 
and  religion. 

To  Descartes  rather  than  to  Bacon  belongs  the  honor 
of  having  brought  the  natural  sciences  into  entire  ac- 
cord with  the  modern  spirit.  He  reduced  the  phenome- 
nal world  to  a  mere  problem  of  space  and  movement; 
he  substituted  quantities  and  mathematical  measure- 
ments for  the  discussion  of  qualities  ;  he  banished  from 
science  the  speculations  about  entities,  essences,  occult 
properties  and  final  causes  which  had  encumbered  the 
philosophy  of  the  schools.  Descartes,  however,  still  re- 
mained in  great  measure  mediaeval  in  his  psychology, 
conceiving  as  he  did  of  the  soul  as  living  quite  apart 
from  the  body,  having  its  seat  in  the  pineal  gland,  in 
much  the  same  way,  to  quote  a  recent  writer,  "  as  the 
hermit  crab  resides  in  its  borrowed  shell."  The  constant 
tendency  since  Descartes  has  been  to  deny  man  this  su- 
periority of  essence  over  the  rest  of  creation,  and  to 
assimilate  him  more  and  more,  body  and  soul,  to  the 
lower  animals.  Moliere,  in  "  Les  Femmes  Savantes,"  is 
one  of  the  first  to  protest  against  the  mechanical  sep- 
aration of  the  soul  from  the  body,  for  which  the  pre- 
cieuses  sought  a  sanction  in  Descartes  :  — 

"  Oui,  mon  corps  est  moi-mgme," 
and 

"  Mon  §,me  et  mon  corps  marchent  de  compagnie,"  etc. 

The  last  step  is  taken  by  Taine  when  he  affirms  that 
the  soul  is  a  natural  product,  and  should  therefore  be 
treated  by  the  same  methods  as  other  natural  phenom- 
ena. In  psychology  as  in  the  other  sciences  we  must 


TAINE  237 

refrain  from  all  consideration  of  qualities  and  absolute 
values,  and  confine  ourselves  to  observation  and  exact 
measurements.  "  Science  draws  near  at  last  and  draws 
near  to  man ;  it  has  passed  the  visible  and  palpable 
world  of  stars,  plants  and  stones  to  which  men  had  dis- 
dainfully confined  it;  it  is  laying  hold  upon  the  soul, 
having  at  its  disposal  all  the  keen  and  exact  instru- 
ments of  which  three  hundred  years  of  experiment  have 
proved  the  precision  and  measured  the  scope."  1 

This  one  thought  —  the  application  of  scientific 
method  to  the  soul  —  runs  through  all  the  writings  of 
Taine,  and  gives  them  their  extraordinary  unity.  He 
has  ranged  through  ancient  and  modern  history,  litera- 
ture and  art,  in  search  of  illustrations  for  this  his  main 
thesis.  A  book  or  picture  interests  him  chiefly  as  a 
"  sign  "  or  "  document  "  giving  evidence  of  some  phase 
of  the  human  spirit  in  the  past.  This  general  character 
visible  in  a  work  of  art  is  due,  not  to  the  free  choice  of 
the  artist,  but  to  the  fact  that  he  acted  under  the  im- 
pulse of  a  "  master  faculty " ;  and  the  nature  of  this 
"  master  faculty"  is  determined  in  turn  by  the  artist's 
"  race  "  and  heredity,  the  climate  and  "  environment " 
which  have  made  his  race  what  it  is,  and  by  the  "  mo- 
ment" hi  the  historical  development  of  his  race  at  which 
his  life  has  happened  to  fall.  Under  this  accumulation 
of  outer  influences  the  free  agency  of  the  individual 
tends  entirely  to  disappear.  For  it  would  not  be  possi- 
ble to  prove  that  "  vice  and  virtue  are  products  like 
sugar  and  vitriol," 2  if  a  single  act  of  the  individual  will 

1  Lit.  ang.,  iv,  423.  •  Lit.  ang.,  I,  p.  XT. 


238  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

intervened  to  break  the  chain  of  natural  causes  and 
thus  baffle  all  the  previsions  of  the  analyst.  This  deter- 
minism or  scientific  fatalism,  though  nowhere  expressly 
formulated  by  Taine,  is  a  necessary  corollary  of  his 
doctrine. 

Taine  is  also  led  logically  by  his  method  to  deny  the 
existence  of  the  soul  in  the  sense  of  a  permanent  ego 
behind  the  flux  of  phenomena.  Thus  understood,  the 
soul  is  only  the  last  and  most  troublesome  of  the  medi- 
aeval "entities"  of  which  the  positivist  is  trying  to 
purge  science.  The  ego  in  the  eyes  of  Taine  is  only  a 
resultant  —  the  point  of  convergence  of  certain  natural 
forces,  with  no  reality  apart  from  these  forces,  or  from 
what  he  calls  the  "  succession  of  its  events."  *  "  Beings, 
whether  physical  or  moral,"  seen  from  this  point  of 
view,  resemble  "  an  infinite  number  of  rockets  .  .  . 
forever  and  unceasingly  rising  and  falling  in  the  black- 
ness of  the  void." 2  Man,  thus  bereft  of  all  principle  of 
superiority  over  nature,  is  tossed  helplessly  in  the  vast 
ebb  and  flow  of  natural  forces :  — 

"  0  we  poor  orphans  of  nothing  —  alone  on  that  lonely  shore 
Born  of  the  brainless  nature  who  knew  not  that  which  she  bore !  " 

In  a  celebrated  image,3  Taine  compares  the  position 
of  the  human  family  in  the  midst  of  the  blind  and  in- 
different powers  of  nature  to  that  of  a  lot  of  field-mice 
exposed  to  the  tramplings  of  a  herd  of  elephants ;  and 
he  concludes  that  "  the  best  fruit  of  our  science  is  cold 
resignation  which,  pacifying  and  preparing  the  spirit, 

1  La  file  de  ses  e'venements.  —  Preface  de  P  Intelligence,  9. 
9  Ibid.,  H.  *  Vie  et  opinions  d«  Thomas  Graindorge,  265. 


TAINE  239 

reduces  suffering  to  bodily  pain." l  Bourget2  has  traced 
the  relation  between  this  philosophy  of  Taine  and  the 
pessimism  and  discouragement  so  rife  in  France  during 
the  last  generation.  All  the  nobler  aspirations  of  man, 
all  his  notions  of  conduct,  had  clustered  around  the  old- 
time  conception  of  the  soul,  and  of  the  struggle  between 
a  higher  and  lower  self.  The  weakening  of  the  tradi- 
tional belief  has  been  followed  by  such  an  unsettling 
of  all  fixed  standards,  by  such  intellectual  and  moral 
chaos,  that  we  are  inclined  to  ask  whether  the  modern 
man  has  not  lost  in  force  of  will  and  character  more 
than  an  equivalent  of  what  he  has  gained  in  scientific 
knowledge  of  life.  Do  we  not  miss  in  Goethe  himself, 
that  high-priest  of  the  modern  spirit,  a  certain  elevation 
and  purity,  such  as  we  find,  for  example,  in  Pascal,  one 
of  the  last  great  representatives  of  the  mediaeval  idealism  ? 
The  triumph  of  naturalism  has  been  followed  by  a  serious 
falling-off,  for  the  moment  at  least,  in  the  more  purely 
spiritual  activities  of  man.  Taine  refused  to  recognize 
himself  in  M.  Sixte,  the  philosopher  in  Bourget's  "  Dis- 
ciple," whose  deterministic  doctrines  impelled  Robert 
Greslou  to  crime.3  He  resented  still  more  strongly  the 
claims  of  writers  like  Zola  to  be  his  disciples.  Yet  there 
is  a  real  relation  between  the  doctrines  of  Taine  and 
those  of  Zola  and  the  other  promoters  of  what  has  been 
termed  la  litterature  brutale  —  the  literature  which  ex- 
alts the  power  of  the  animal  passions,  proclaims  the 
tyranny  of  temperament,  and  seeks  the  determining  f  ac- 

1  Vie  et  opinions  de  Thomas  Graindorge,  266. 

8  Essais  de  psychologic  contemporaine,  233  S.        '  Vie  et  cor.,  IV,  287  ff. 


240  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

tors  of  conduct  in  the  blood  and  nerves.  Taine  himself  in 
his  "  English  Literature  "  has  multiplied  epithets  describ- 
ing the  irresistible  pressure  of  natural  causes  upon  man. 
"  What  we  call  nature  is  this  brood  of  secret  impulses, 
often  maleficent,  generally  vulgar,  always  blind,  which 
tremble  and  fret  within  us,  ill-covered  by  the  cloak  of 
decency  and  reason  under  which  we  try  to  disguise  them; 
we  think  we  lead  them  and  they  lead  us ;  we  think  our 
actions  our  own,  they  are  theirs."  *  This  fatality  of  in- 
stinct makes  even  the  romantic  fatality  of  passion  look 
respectable. 

If  Taine  took  so  brutal  a  view  of  life  it  was  not  be- 
cause he  himself  was  brutal,  but  because  he  was,  on 
the  contrary,  one  of  the  gentlest  of  men.  Life  is  likely 
to  seem  especially  ferocious  to  the  man  who  stands  aside 
from  action  and  becomes  extremely  sensitive  and  intel- 
lectual without  at  the  same  time  developing  in  himself, 
as  Pascal  did,  for  example,  the  sense  of  a  principle  of 
superiority  in  man  to  the  monstrous,  blind  forces  of 
nature.  Taine  would  not  indeed  admit  that  he  was  a 
pessimist,  or  an  optimist,  either,  for  that  matter.  He 
looked  upon  both  attitudes  towards  life  as  unscientific. 
He  disclaimed  on  the  same  ground  any  moral  responsi- 
bility for  the  practical  consequences  of  his  thinking. 
He  asserted,  especially  at  the  beginning  of  his  career, 
the  doctrine  of  science  for  the  sake  of  science.2  He  was 
also  ready  to  affirm  the  doctrine  of  art  for  art's  sake. 
The  older  he  grew  the  more  anxious  he  became  to  jus- 
tify art  and  science,  if  not  morally,  at  least  socially.  A 
1  Lit.  ang.,  nr,  130.  J  PJulosophes  classiques,  36-37. 


TAINE  241 

pure  naturalist  may,  according  to  Pascal's  great  general- 
ization, be  either  a  stoic  or  an  epicurean.  Taine  is  one 
of  the  best  examples  in  recent  times  of  pure  stoicism.  In 
enumerating  the  main  influences  upon  him  I  failed  to 
mention  that  his  favorite  author  was  Marcus  Aurelius. 
"  Our  positive  science,"  he  says,  "  has  penetrated  more 
deeply  into  the  details  of  the  laws  that  rule  the  world, 
but  save  for  differences  of  language  it  culminates  in 
this  total  view  " l  (that  is,  the  view  of  Marcus  Aurelius). 
And  he  writes  in  a  letter  towards  the  end  of  his  life, 
"Marcus  Aurelius  is  the  gospel  of  those  of  us  who  have 
passed  through  philosophy  and  the  sciences;  he  says 
to  people  of  our  cultivation  what  Jesus  says  to  the  com- 
mon people."2  This,  I  take  it,  is  a  good  example  of  the 
stoic  pride.  In  some  respects  it  is  farther  from  true 
wisdom  than  the  epicurean  relaxation. 

Taine  was  at  all  events  a  worthy  disciple.  It  is  diffi- 
cult to  make  a  long  study  of  him  and  not  esteem  him 
personally,  however  one  may  withhold  this  esteem  from 
his  philosophy.  Marcus  Aurelius  was  as  much  filled  as 
one  of  our  modern  humanitarians  with  the  zeal  for  ser- 
vice, and  in  this  respect  Taine  came  more  and  more  to 
resemble  his  master.  He  had  begun  by  saying  that  the 
scientific  critic  neither  blames  nor  praises,  but  merely 
takes  cognizance  of  and  explains ;  and  we  have  already 
seen  to  what  kind  of  human  fauna  he  accorded  his 
aesthetic  approval.  "  Criticism,"  he  says,  "  does  like  bo- 
tany, which  studies  with  equal  interest  at  one  moment 
the  orange  tree,  at  another  the  pine ;  at  one  moment  the 

1  Nouveaux  essais,  etc.,  316.  *  Vie  et  cor.,  iv,  274. 


242  MODERN  FKENCH  CRITICISM 

laurel,  and  at  another  the  birch ;  it  is  itself  a  sort  of  bo- 
tany applied  not  to  plants  but  to  the  works  of  man." 
But  in  his  "Philosophy  of  Art"  (1865-69)  he  strives 
to  value  and  classify  as  well  as  take  cognizance  and 
explain.  It  is  not  necessary  to  dwell  at  length  on  his 
efforts  in  these  volumes  to  arrive  at  a  standard  of  judg- 
ment ;  first,  because  these  efforts  have  been  comparatively 
uninfluential ;  secondly,  because  he  does  not  succeed 
after  all  in  transcending  naturalism  —  in  other  words, 
the  phenomenal  and  the  relative.  Perhaps  the  chief  point 
he  makes  is  that  we  may  judge  of  a  work  of  art  by  its 
degree  of  beneficence,  that  is  by  its  social  utility.  We 
may  say  that  some  books  and  works  of  art  are  noxious 
weeds,  whereas  others  are  to  be  esteemed  by  their  fruits. 
This  is  a  standard  that  on  the  whole  works  against  his 
early  romantic  admirations ;  and  so  we  may  note  a  grow- 
ing severity  for  the  romanticists,  especially  in  his  essays 
on  George  Sand  and  Edouard  Bertin.  If  he  had  lived  to 
write  the  last  volume  of  the  "  Origines  "  we  may  infer 
from  the  memoranda  he  left  behind  him  that  his  treat- 
ment of  the  school  of  1830  (including  Alfred  de  Musset) 
would  have  been  scathing.1  Taine  puts  this  development 
in  his  point  of  view  under  the  patronage  of  Goethe,  "  the 
great  promoter,"  as  he  calls  him,  "  of  all  our  contempo- 
rary culture."  But  Goethe  was  not  simply  a  great  natur- 
alist ;  he  was  also  a  humanist.  He  felt  intuitively  that 
side  of  man  which  is  on  a  different  level  from  the  animal 
or  plant.  So  far  as  his  intuitions  are  concerned,  Taine 
seems  to  me  never  to  have  risen  above  the  botanical  or 

zoological  levels. 

1  Vie  et  cor.,  in,  309  f . 


TAINE  243 

rv 

I  have  just  spoken  of  the  "  Origines."  The  shock  of 
the  war  of  1870  and  the  Commune,  which  so  under- 
mined  the  seriousness  of  Renan,  had  just  the  opposite 
effect  on  Taine.  He  became  more  austerely  serious  than 
ever,  and  in  undertaking  his  great  historical  work  he 
was  moved  by  a  passionate  desire  to  serve  his  country 
and  warn  it  against  the  abyss  towards  which  it  seemed 
to  him  to  be  hastening.  The  indignation  that  quivers  in 
his  style  contrasts  strangely  with  his  promise  to  study 
the  Revolution  with  the  coolness  of  a  naturalist  observ- 
ing "the  metamorphosis  of  an  insect,"  and  in  general 
with  the  attitude  of  the  detenninist  who  looks  on  vice 
and  virtue  as  products  like  vitriol  and  sugar.  His  pas- 
sion animates  his  logic  and  his  logic  imposes  upon  him 
in  turn  the  choice  and  arrangement  he  makes  of  his  im- 
mense accumulation  of  little  facts.  He  manages  so  to 
select  these  little  facts  as  to  add  gloom  even  to  the  Reign 
of  Terror.  Views  of  the  Revolution  may  be  held,  very 
different  from  those  of  Taine,  but  it  is  hardly  likely  that 
what  one  may  term  the  legend  of  the  Revolution  will 
ever  recover  from  the  sombre  and  concentrated  energy 
of  his  attack.  It  will  not  be  easy  for  the  Hugos  and 
Michelets  of  the  future  to  grow  rhapsodic  over  the 
"  giants  of  '93."  One  may  say  that  the  whole  work  con- 
verges on  his  psychological  analysis  of  the  Jacobin. 
Taine's  violent  logic  is  never  so  effective  as  when  thus 
used  to  attack  men  who  are  themselves  violently  logical. 

The  weakest  part  of  his  argument  is  the  attempt  to 


244  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

show  that  the  excess  of  abstract  reasoning  for  which 
he  assails  the  Jacobins  is  a  direct  outcome  of  the  classic 
spirit.  He  has  been  misled  in  an  extraordinary  way  in 
assuming  that  the  pseudo-classic  veneer  one  finds  in 
a  Robespierre,  for  example,  has  any  relation  to  the 
reality  of  classicism.  Boileau,  says  Taine,  was  the  an- 
cestor of  Robespierre.1  Now  the  authentic  ancestor  of 
Boileau  was  Horace,  so  that  Horace  is  thus  held  in- 
directly responsible  for  the  Reign  of  Terror !  Taine  has 
lost  sight  of  the  simple  distinction  implied  in  John 
Adams's  saying  that  man  is  a  reasoning,  but  not  a 
reasonable,  animal.  This  saying  is  manifestly  true  of 
the  Jacobins,  but  if  applied  to  a  true  classicist  would 
have  to  be  exactly  reversed.  Reason,  though  somewhat 
more  abstract  in  Boileau  than  in  Horace,  still  means  the 
intuitive  good  sense  that  is  opposed  to  everything  fan- 
tastic and  extreme  (including  the  extreme  of  logic). 
Boileau  himself  was  remarkably  intuitive  in  this  sense, 
but  somewhat  weak,  especially  for  a  Frenchman,  in 
logic.  Taine's  identification  of  Jacobinism  with  the 
classic  spirit  is  therefore,  as  M.  Faguet  says,  about  the 
most  complete  blunder  ever  made  both  in  the  interpre- 
tation of  texts  as  well  as  in  literary  history. 

The  presence  in  man  of  an  intuitive  good  sense  pecu- 
liarly his  own,  and  warning  him  against  violence  and 
excess,  Taine  simply  denied.  To  say  that  he  was  con- 
scious of  no  such  balance  wheel  in  man  is  only  to  repeat 
in  another  form  my  assertion  that  he  lacked  the  sense 
of  the  human.  "  Properly  speaking,"  he  had  written  in 

1  Vie  et  cor.,  Hi,  268. 


TAINE  245 

his  "  English  Literature,"  "  man  is  mad  as  the  body  is 
sick  by  nature.  Reason  as  well  as  health  is  in  us  only 
a  momentary  success  and  a  happy  accident." 1  He  was 
confirmed  in  this  blackly  naturalistic  view  of  man  by 
his  study  of  the  Revolution.  He  came  to  feel  with  Cole- 
ridge that  human  nature  is  not  a  goddess  in  petticoats, 
but  a  devil  in  a  strait-waistcoat.  In  that  case  why  not 
return  to  the  regime  of  the  strait-waistcoat  ?  Since  man 
is  not  capable  of  an  inner  check,  why  not  seek  to  recover 
the  outer  checks,  the  traditional  restraints,  religious  and 
political?  But  Taine  would  not,  like  others  who  have 
followed  a  similar  course  of  reasoning,  abdicate  his  pride 
of  science  and  become  a  reactionary. 

On  the  contrary,  the  first  volume  of  the  "Origines" 
(in  some  respects  his  masterpiece)  is  an  attack  on  the 
old  order  that  alienated  the  true  reactionaries.  He  set 
out  to  show  that  the  abuses  of  the  Monarchy  produced 
inevitably  the  abuses  of  the  Revolution,  and  the  abuses 
of  the  Revolution  those  of  the  Empire.  He  thus  offended 
in  turn  all  parties  —  monarchical,  radical,  Napoleonic. 
He  not  only  had  to  face  this  general  disappoval,  but 
suffered  also  in  one  of  his  cherished  friendships,  that 
with  the  Princesse  Mathilde,  who  broke  with  him  ab- 
ruptly on  the  publication  of  his  portrait  of  Napoleon. 
The  final  impression  one  has  of  Taine  is  that  of  an  in- 
creasing moral  solitude. 

In  cutting  himself  off  from  so  much  human  sympathy, 
he  did  not  even  have  the  consolation  of  believing  in  the 
efficacy  of  the  enormous  task  to  which  he  had  devoted 

1  Lit.  ang.,  n,  158. 


246  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

twenty  years  of  toil.  "  I  probably  made  a  mistake  twenty 
years  ago,"  he  writes  towards  the  end,  "  in  undertaking 
this  series  of  investigations ;  they  are  darkening  my  old 
age,  and  I  feel  more  and  more  that  from  the  practical 
point  of  view  they  will  be  useless ;  an  enormous  and  swift 
current  is  carrying  us  away ;  of  what  avail  is  it  to  write 
a  memoir  on  its  depth  and  swiftness?  "l  He  had  schooled 
himself  too  thoroughly  to  see  in  history,  not  the  action 
of  individuals,  but  of  certain  collective  causes  against 
which  the  individual  is  well-nigh  powerless.  We  are 
always  hearing  in  his  philosophy  of  the  way  the  outward 
acts  upon  the  inward,  but  rarely  of  the  way  the  inward 
acts  upon  the  outward. 

He  evidently  failed  to  respect  sufficiently  the  mystery 
of  personality  in  thus  making  of  it  only  the  meeting- 
place  and  playground  of  outer  influences.  Sainte-Beuve, 
as  we  have  seen,  anxious  though  he  was  to  write  "  1'his- 
toire  naturelle  des  esprits,"  showed  greater  prudence 
when  he  confessed :  "  We  shall  doubtless  never  be  able 
to  treat  man  in  exactly  the  same  way  as  plants  or  ani- 
mals."2 The  contrary  supposition  has  found  fitting  ex- 
pression in  a  certain  school  of  experimental  psychology. 
Emerson  perceived  this  drift  towards  scientific  material- 
ism and  raised  a  cry  of  warning:  "I  see  not,  if  one  be 
once  caught  in  this  trap  of  so-called  sciences,  any  escape 
for  the  man  from  the  links  of  the  chain  of  physical 
necessity.  Given  such  an  embryo,  such  a  history  must 
follow.  On  this  platform  one  lives  in  a  sty  of  sensual- 
ism, and  would  soon  come  to  suicide.  But  it  is  impos- 

1  Vie  et  cor.,  iv,  338.  *  N.  Lundis,  in,  16. 


TAINE  247 

sible  that  the  creative  power  should  exclude  itself.  Into 
every  intelligence  there  is  a  door  which  is  never  closed, 
through  which  the  creator  passes.  The  intellect,  seeker 
of  absolute  truth,  or  the  heart,  lover  of  absolute  good, 
intervenes  for  our  succor,  and  at  one  whisper  of  these 
high  powers  we  awake  from  ineffectual  struggles  with 
this  nightmare.  We  hurl  it  into  its  own  hell,  and  can- 
not again  contract  ourselves  to  so  base  a  state."1  We 
may  add  that  in  the  most  commonplace  personality 
there  is  a  fraction,  however  infinitesimal,  which  eludes 
all  attempts  at  analysis;  and  this  indefinable  fraction, 
this  residuum  of  pure  and  abstract  liberty,  not  to  be 
expressed  in  terms  of  time  and  space,  increases  in  strict 
ratio  to  the  man's  originality.  What  is  true  of  the  indi- 
vidual applies  equally  to  a  race  or  historic  period.  The 
bushmen  of  Australia  fall  more  readily  into  the  categories 
of  Taine  than  the  Greeks  of  the  age  of  Pericles.  There 
is  something  in  the  best  work  of  this  age  that  is  set 
above  all  the  changing  circumstances  of  time  and  place, 
and  still  appeals  to  a  kindred  element  in  us.  But  Taine 
is  more  concerned  with  differences  than  with  identities. 
He  has  in  this  respect  pushed  to  an  extreme  the  method 
of  Madame  de  Stael.  In  works  like  his  "  English  Notes," 
he  undertakes  to  define  the  English  national  type  in  its 
ultimate  differences  from  other  national  types  much  after 
her  fashion  in  "  Corinne  "  and  the  "  Germany."  In  the 
"  La  Fontaine,"  again,  he  tends  to  see  in  the  poet  the 
expression  of  certain  French  racial  traits  and  of  French 
society  in  the  seventeenth  century  rather  than  the  uni- 

1  Essay  on  Experience. 


248  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

versal  human  appeal.  To  treat  a  writer  in  this  way  is  to 
run  the  risk  of  losing  sight  of  what  gives  him  rank  and 
importance  in  literature.  A  writer,  to  have  high  literary 
standing,  must  combine  in  himself  two  things,  neither 
of  which  is  primarily  an  expression  of  his  race  and  time. 
In  the  first  place  he  must  be  unique.  In  the  second 
place  we  must  feel  mysteriously  interwoven  with  his 
uniqueness  the  presence  of  our  common  humanity.  Great 
writers  therefore  refuse  to  be  imprisoned  in  their  en- 
vironment. They  radiate  even  more  than  they  receive 
influences.  In  this  sense  it  has  been  said  of  the  man  of 
genius  that  he  is  a  monarch  who  creates  his  subjects, 
and  so  is  a  contemporary  of  the  future. 

It  is  but  natural  that  Taine  should  have  failed  most 
signally  in  his  "  English  Literature  "  in  trying  to  apply  his 
method  to  the  supreme  originality  of  Shakespeare.  We 
may  object  to  his  attempt  to  confine  the  genius  of  Shake- 
speare in  a  formula  as  he  would  a  chemical  gas,  even 
though  we  may  not,  like  Matthew  Arnold,  see  in  Shake- 
speare one  who  "  out-tops  knowledge,"  even  as  a  moun- 
tain, which 

"  Making  the  heaven  of  heavens  his  dwelling-place 
Spares  but  the  cloudy  border  of  his  base 
To  the  foil'd  searching  of  mortality." 

In  fact,  what  most  strikes  one  about  Taine's  method  as 
applied  to  great  writers  is  its  extraordinary  irrelevancy. 
We  may  imagine  twin  brothers,  one  with  a  superior  liter- 
ary gift,  the  other  a  mediocrity.  The  same  influences  of 
race,  environment  and  moment  have  acted  upon  them. 
They  ought  according  to  the  theory  to  have  the  same 


TAINE  249 

master  faculty.  There  is  plainly  an  unbridgeable  gap  here 
between  causes  that  are  collective  and  general  and  a  cause 
like  the  master  faculty  that  is  in  the  highest  degree  indi- 
vidual. As  applied  to  the  great  Corneille,  Taine's  method, 
it  has  been  said,  explains  everything  that  he  had  in 
common  with  his  brother  Thomas,  that  is,  everything 
that  might,  without  great  loss,  have  remained  unex- 
plained. All  this  historical  setting  and  background  was 
originally  intended  to  bear  to  literary  criticism  about 
the  relationship  that  the  frame  does  to  the  picture ;  but 
in  Taine  and  his  school,  as  has  been  pointed  out,  the 
frame  tends  to  take  the  place  of  the  picture.  Scherer 
remarks  with  his  usual  severity  that  in  the  "  Philosophy 
of  Greek  Art"  Taine  gives  us  two  hundred  pages  of 
elegant  and  ingenious  description  of  Greece  and  Greek 
life,  but  "  take  away  six  lines  from  the  beginning,  and 
the  volume  of  M.  Taine  will  be  found  to  contain  not  a 
word  of  art  and  not  a  word  of  philosophy."  * 

To  use  art  and  literature  merely  as  a  "  sign  "  or  "  docu- 
ment" to  explain  a  society  or  epoch,  instead  of  using  the 
history  of  the  society  as  an  aid  to  the  understanding  of 
its  art  and  literature,  is  in  itself  a  radical  confusion  of 
the  genres.  The  difficulty  would  have  been  at  least  partly 
remedied  if  Taine  had,  for  example,  called  his  work  on 
English  literature  by  some  such  title  as  "  English  So- 
ciety as  Reflected  in  its  Literature."  For  if  he  does  not 
always  do  justice  to  individual  writers,  he  often  does 
succeed  admirably  in  marking  the  main  characteristics 
of  an  epoch,  in  following  out  the  great  streams  of  tend- 

1  Etudes,  iv,  267. 


250  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ency,  in  noting  interactions  and  interdependences.  His 
logic  and  intellectual  vigor  not  only  show  to  advant- 
age here,  but  are  precious  as  correcting  a  lack  of  these 
virtues  in  ourselves.  A  hundred  English  and  American 
readers  have  probably  received  a  wholesome  stimulus 
from  the  "English  Literature"  for  one  who  has  been  un- 
duly affected  by  its  pseudo-scientific  bias.  And  then, 
too,  if  we  are  to  judge  Taine  equitably,  we  must  make 
another  most  important  reservation.  It  is  true  that  his 
method  from  a  purely  literary  point  of  view  is  one  of 
the  worst  ever  devised,  but  it  is  likewise  true  that  he  is 
often  a  great  critic  not  because  of  this  method,  but  in 
spite  of  it.  He  looked  on  himself  as  being  above  all  a 
psychologist ;  so  far  as  he  means  by  this  that  he  applies 
science  to  the  human  soul,  he  is  only  too  often  pseudo- 
psychological.  We  simply  have  a  harsh  application  of 
the  esprit  de  geometric  to  values  that  elude  it.  But 
very  often,  too,  he  forgets  his  system  and  becomes 
psychological  in  the  same  sense  as  Sainte-Beuve,  that 
is,  he  shows  the  gift  for  psychological  portraiture  which 
the  French  have  been  cultivating  for  centuries  and  in 
which  they  have  attained  an  extraordinary  perfection. 
But  even  when  he  is  psychological  in  this  very  legit- 
imate sense  we  are  occasionally  brought  up  with  a  jerk, 
and  reminded  unpleasantly  that  we  are  tethered  to  a 
system. 

v 

The  era  of  scientific  positivism,  of  which  Taine  is  a 
chief  representative,  appears  at  present  to  be  drawing  to 
a  close.  The  forms  in  which  it  embodied  itself  are  coming 


TAINE  251 

to  seem  too  dogmatic  to  the  scientists  themselves.  "  I 
believe  that  absolute,  concatenated,  geometrical  science 
exists,"1  wrote  Taineas  a  young  man.  If  he  had  lived 
in  the  Middle  Ages  he  would  no  doubt  have  believed 
that  absolute  and  geometrical  religion  exists.  Both  the 
theologian  and  the  dogmatic  scientist  are  victims  of 
the  metaphysical  illusion.  Taine  not  only  believed  that 
both  nature  and  human  nature  can  be  brought  under  a 
common  law,  but  that  ultimately  they  may  be  brought 
under  a  common  formula.  The  single  gigantic  scientific 
Formula  of  which  he  has  a  glimpse  at  the  apex  of  his 
pyramid  of  generalizations  is  the  nearest  equivalent  in 
his  work  to  the  theologian's  vision  of  God.  "  This  crea- 
tive formula  .  .  .  fills  time  and  space  and  remains  above 
time  and  space.  It  is  not  comprised  in  them  and  they 
derive  from  it.  All  life  is  one  of  its  moments,  all  being 
is  one  of  its  forms;  and  the  series  of  objects  descend 
from  it  in  accordance  with  indestructible  necessities, 
bound  together  by  the  divine  links  of  its  golden  chain. 
The  indifferent,  the  immobile,  the  eternal,  the  all-power- 
ful—  no  name  exhausts  it ;  and  when  its  calm  and  sub- 
lime face  is  unveiled,  there  is  no  human  spirit  which  does 
not  bow,  stricken  with  admiration  and  horror.  At  the 
same  moment  our  spirit  is  uplifted ;  we  forget  our  mor- 
tality and  pettiness ;  we  enjoy  sympathetically  the  infini- 
tude of  our  thought  and  participate  in  its  grandeur."5 

In  spirit  this  is  worthy  of  Marcus  Aurelius  and  the 
other  stoics  at  their  best ;  in  substance  it  is  an  extreme 
example  of  the  metaphysical  illusion.  Formula  are 

1  Vie  et  cor.,  i,  47.  *  Phil.classiques,  370-76. 


252  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

excellent  and  necessary  in  dealing  with  both  the  human 
and  the  natural  law,  but  must  always  be  provisional, 
because  both  laws  lay  hold  upon  the  infinite.  That  is 
why,  as  Emerson  says,  truth  is  "so  unbottleable  and 
unbarrelable  a  commodity."  We  need  therefore  to  piece 
out  our  formulae  with  our  intuitions ;  intuitions  of  the 
Many  if  we  are  dealing  with  the  natural  order;  intui- 
tions of  the  One  if  we  are  dealing  with  man's  peculiar 
domain.  Wisdom  for  the  humanist,  as  I  have  already 
said,  does  not  lie  in  putting  too  exclusive  an  emphasis 
on  either  order  of  intuitions,  but  in  mediating  between 
the  two  orders,  between  vital  impulse  (elan  vital)  and 
vital  control  (frein  vital). 

To  each  order  of  intuitions  corresponds  its  own  type 
of  spontaneity.  The  attempt  of  Taine  and  the  deter- 
minists  to  imprison  both  nature  and  human  nature  in 
their  formulae  is  a  denial  of  both  types  of  spontaneity. 
As  appears  from  a  passage  I  have  quoted  from  Emerson 
(p.  246)  we  may  escape  from  this  nightmare  of  intellect- 
ualism  by  an  appeal  to  our  intuition  of  the  One.  But 
rather  than  consent  to  have  the  activity  of  their  own 
spirits  reduced  to  a  "problem  of  mechanics,"1  to  the 
grinding  of  cogs  and  the  creaking  of  pulleys,  men  are 
ready  to  follow  those  who  appeal  from  intellectualism  to 
the  intuitions  of  the  Many ;  though  in  itself  this  appeal 
can  result  only  in  a  decadent  naturalism.  To  the  exalta- 
tion of  this  type  of  spontaneity  is  due  the  vogue  of  a 
long  series  of  philosophers  from  Rousseau  to  M.  Bergson. 
Man  is  no  longer  with  Bergson,  as  with  Taine,  a  "  living 

1   Lit.  any.,  I,  p.  xxxii. 


TAINE  253 

geometry,"  whose  formula  may  be  worked  out  mathe- 
matically and  whose  future  may  be  predicted  from  his 
present,  in  such  a  way  as  to  eliminate  time  as  an  effective 
factor.  This,  says  M.  Bergson,  is  to  impose  mechanism 
upon  organism,  the  geometric  upon  the  vital  order.1  For 
the  organic,  "  time  is  the  very  stuff  of  reality,"  2  accom- 
panied as  it  is  by  a  "constant  gushing-forth  of  novelties," 
unpredictable  from  the  platform  of  intellect.  In  fact  we 
can  get  a  glimpse  of  reality,  says  M.  Bergson,  giving  a 
new  form  to  the  Rousseauistic  strife  between  head  and 
heart,  only  by  twisting  ourselves  about  and  "  intuiting  " 
the  creative  flux.3  Instead  of  inviting  us,  like  Plato,  to 
use  our  intellectual  distinctions  as  rounds  in  the  ladder 
that  leads  to  the  intuition  of  the  One,  he  would  have  us 
turn  our  backs  on  our  intellects  in  order  that  we  may 
peer  down  into  the  vast  swirling  depths  of  the  evolu- 
tionary process.  He  does  not  recognize  the  potentiality 
in  man  of  a  spontaneity  that  resists  the  flux  and  imposes 
upon  it  a  human  purpose.  M.  Bergson  sees  no  escape 
from  the  frenzied  intellectualism  of  Taine  and  his  con- 
temporaries save  in  an  equally  frenzied  romanticism; 
and  herein  of  course  he  agrees  with  James  and  the  prag- 
matists.  We  may  note  in  passing  that  James  not  only 
defends  the  romantic  attitude  directly,  but  strives  to 
discredit  the  word  classical  by  adopting  Taine's  misap- 
prehension of  it,  and  making  it  synonymous  with  the 
scholastic  and  dryly  rational.4  As  a  matter  of  fact  the 
intellectualism  of  Taine  is  much  nearer  to  being  clas- 

1  L'Evolution  creatrice,  247.  3  Ibid.,  4.  •  Ibid.,  175. 

4  See  article  by  James  in  The  Nation  (New  York),  March  31,  1910. 


254  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

sical  as  he  and  James  misunderstand  the  word  than 
is  the  intuitive  good  sense  of  a  Horace,  let  us  say,  or  a 
Boileau. 

VI 

Our  impatience  at  the  exaggerated  determinism  of 
Taine  and  his  disciples  should  be  tempered  by  the  reflec- 
tion that  it  was  perhaps  only  a  necessary  recoil  from  an 
equal  exaggeration  in  the  opposite  direction.  Mediaeval 
religion  tended  to  isolate  man  altogether  from  nature  and 
from  his  fellows,  to  raise  him  above  time  and  space,  and 
to  regard  him  as  entirely  dependent  upon  divine  grace 
and  his  own  free  will.  The  saint  strove  to  attain  perfec- 
tion by  the  repression  of  all  the  natural  instincts.  The 
extravagances  of  the  romances  of  chivalry  which  Cer- 
vantes satirized,  are  only  another  expression  of  this  cult 
of  the  heroic  personality  in  defiance  of  all  the  limita- 
tions of  the  real.  Taine,  on  the  contrary,  has  devoted 
extraordinary  powers  of  analysis  to  showing  the  mani- 
fold ways  in  which  the  individual  will  is  limited  and 
conditioned  by  natural  law,  and  to  demonstrating  how 
"every  living  thing  is  held  in  the  iron  grasp  of  neces- 
sity." 1  He  also  undertakes  to  prove  that  man  is  circum- 
scribed in  his  institutions  no  less  than  in  his  individuality 
by  this  natural  necessity ;  these  too  are  historical  products, 
largely  related  to  their  surroundings,  and  to  be  modified, 
if  at  all,  only  by  slow  process  of  evolution.  He  is,  there- 
fore, perfectly  logical  in  his  attack  upon  the  French 
Revolution;  for  at  bottom  the  revolutionary  spirit  is 
only  a  transformation  of  the  old  idealism  and  its  mis- 

1  Lit.  ang.,  v,  411. 


TAINE  255 

application  to  politics.  The  Jacobin,  like  the  mediaeval 
doctor,  substitutes  an  ideal  entity  for  living,  breathing 
men,  lets  formulae  come  between  himself  and  direct  con- 
tact with  reality,  and  believes  of  human  institutions  as 
his  mediaeval  predecessor  had  believed  of  individuals,  that 
they  may  be  made  over  with  reference  to  an  abstract 
model  by  a  mere  fiat  of  the  will. 

Naturalism  has  thus  worked  a  far-reaching  transfor- 
mation in  all  departments  of  thought  by  its  twofold 
instrument  of  historical  sympathy  and  scientific  analysis. 
In  literary  criticism,  for  instance,  it  will  hardly  be  pos- 
sible after  Sainte-Beuve  and  Taine  to  return  to  the  point 
of  view  of  an  older  type  of  critic  —  to  treat  a  book  as 
though  it  had  "  fallen  like  a  meteorite  from  the  sky," 1 
and  judge  it  by  comparison  with  an  aesthetic  code,  itself 
constructed  on  a  priori  grounds  like  a  mediaeval  creed. 
In  general,  as  a  result  of  the  labors  of  the  naturalists, 
it  will  not  be  easy  for  men  to  neglect  as  they  once  did 
the  element  of  change  and  relativity.  They  are  not 
likely  to  revert  to  the  crude  dualism,  the  mechanical 
opposition  of  soul  and  body,  the  ascetic  distrust  of 
nature  that  marked  the  mediaeval  period.  In  short,  the 
great  naturalistic  movement  which  extends  from  the 
first  thinkers  of  the  Renaissance  to  Taine  will  be  seen 
in  the  retrospect  to  have  been  a  necessary  reaction 
against  the  excesses  of  the  idealism  of  the  past,  a  neces- 
sary preparation  for  a  saner  idealism  in  the  future. 

Taine's  work  will  always  be  highly  significant  in  the 
history  of  this  movement,  highly  expressive  of  the  "mo- 

1  Flaubert,  Correspondance,  in,  196. 


256  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ment "  at  which  it  probably  culminated.  He  had  in  the 
fullest  measure  the  "spirit  of  his  own  time,"  to  borrow 
Voltaire's  distinction  ;  it  is  less  certain  that  he  combined 
it  with  that  "spirit  which  passes  to  the  remotest  pos- 
terity." It  is  already  apparent  at  all  events  that  his 
criticism  is  not  going  to  wear  so  well  as  that  of  Sainte- 
Beuve. 


IX 

RENAN1 

RENAN  says  that  his  purpose  in  his  "  Souvenirs  "  is 
not  so  much  to  narrate  the  incidents  of  his  youth  as  to 
trace  his  intellectual  origins  and  "  transmit  to  others  his 
theory  of  the  world." 2  The  intellectual  life  he  has  thus 
recorded,  extraordinarily  rich  in  itself,  derives  an  added 
interest  from  the  fact  that  it  is  so  largely  representative 
of  his  age.  He  speaks  in  one  of  his  essays  of  lapensee 
delicate,  fuyante,  insaisis sable  du  xix*  siecle.3  These 
are  the  very  epithets  that  best  describe  his  own  thought. 
He  is  a  Proteus,  whom  no  one  has  yet  succeeded  in  bind- 
ing. It  would  be  possible  to  do  justice  to  him,  says 
Sainte-Beuve,  only  in  a  Platonic  dialogue ;  but  who,  he 
adds,  could  be  found  to  write  it  ? 4  If  Renan  is  thus  subtle 
and  many-sided,  it  is  because  he  embodies  so  perfectly 
the  spirit  of  modern  criticism.  The  first  step  in  under- 
standing him  is  to  have  clearly  in  mind  the  difference 
between  this  new  critical  ideal  and  the  old.  The  critic's 
business  as  once  conceived  was  to  judge  with  reference 
to  a  definite  standard  and  then  to  enforce  his  decisions 
by  his  personal  weight  and  authority.  The  nature  of 

1  Most  of  this  chapter  is  reprinted  from  the  introduction  to  my  edition 
of  the  Souvenirs  d'enfance  et  dejeunesse,  with  the  kind  permission  of  D.  C. 
Heath  &  Co. 

*  Souvenirs,  p.  iii.  •  Dialogues  philosophiques,  299. 

4  Nouvelle  correspondence,  175. 


258  MODERN   FRENCH  CRITICISM 

the  reaction  against  this  conception  is  summed  up  in  a 
phrase  of  Carlyle's :  "  We  must  see  before  we  begin  to 
oversee."  Flexibility  of  intelligence  and  breadth  of  sym- 
pathy come  more  and  more  to  take  the  place  of  authority 
and  judgment  as  the  chief  virtues  of  the  critic.  Mere 
judging —  "  the  blaming  of  this  or  the  praising  of  that," 
says  Renan,  "is  the  mark  of  a  narrow  method."1  If 
the  weakness  of  the  old  criticism  was  its  narrowness  and 
dogmatism,  the  danger  of  the  new  is  that  in  its  endeavor 
to  embrace  the  world  in  a  universal  sympathy,  it  should 
forget  the  task  of  judging  altogether.  Renan  would  rest 
his  criticism  on  the  "  excluding  of  all  exclusiveness,"2  on 
an  intellectual  hospitality  so  vast  as  to  find  room  for 
all  the  contradictory  aspects  of  reality.  "  Formerly,"  he 
says,  "  every  man  had  a  system ;  he  lived  and  died  by  it ; 
now  we  pass  successively  through  all  systems,  or,  better 
still,  understand  them  all  at  once."3  No  one  was  ever 
more  penetrated  by  the  teaching  of  the  Hegelian  logic, 
that  a  truth,  to  become  true,  needs  to  be  completed  by 
its  contrary.  At  first  glance  he  would  seem  to  be  a  new 
kind  of  skeptic,  who,  instead  of  doubting  everything, 
affirms  everything  —  which  is,  of  course,  only  an  indi- 
rect way  of  denying  the  absolute  truth  of  anything.  Yet 
we  could  fall  into  no  more  serious  error  than  to  suppose 
that  Renan  is  a  real  skeptic.  "  Woe  to  the  man,"  he  ex- 
claims, "  who  does  not  contradict  himself  at  least  once 
a  day."4  But  there  are  some  points  on  which  he  never 

1  Avenir  de  la  science,  199.  2  Avenir  de  la  tcicncc,  66. 

8  Dialogues  phil.,  p.  ix. 

4  Etude  sur  I'Ecclesiaste,   24.    Renan   ascribes   this  sentiment  to  the 
Hebrew  writer,  but  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  it  his  own. 


RENAN  259 

contradicts  himself,  however  much  they  may  be  overlaid 
in  his  later  writings  by  irony  and  paradox.  We  can 
come  at  these  essential  affirmations  more  readily  if  we 
turn  to  that  remarkable  work  of  his  youth, "  L' Avenir  de 
la  science,"  recollecting  that  though  written  in  1848  it  did 
not  appear  until  1890,  with  a  preface  in  which  Kenan 
avers  that  at  bottom  he  has  not  changed  in  the  interval. 
In  the  peculiar  fervor  of  the  cult  it  renders  to  science, 
the  book  marks  a  moment,  not  in  the  life  of  Renan  merely, 
but  of  the  century.  We  have  but  to  listen  to  the  dithy- 
rambic  tones  in  which  he  speaks  of  science  to  see  that 
he  has  turned  away  from  the  faith  of  his  childhood  only 
to  become  the  priest  of  another  altar :  "  Science,  then,  is 
a  religion ;  science  alone  in  the  future  will  make  creeds ; 
science  can  alone  solve  for  man  the  everlasting  problems 
the  solution  of  which  his  nature  imperiously  demands."1 
After  humanity  has  been  scientifically  organized,  science 
will  proceed  to  "  organize  God." 2 


Renan  has  evidently  carried  over  to  science  all  the 
mental  habits  of  Catholicism.  As  Sainte-Beuve  remarks, 
"In  France  we  shall  remain  Catholics  long  after  we 
have  ceased  to  be  Christians."3  Renan,  indeed,  may  be 
best  defined  as  a  scientist  and  positivist  with  a  Catholic 
imagination.  For  instance,  he  arrives  at  the  conception 
of  scientific  dogma,4  of  an  infallible  scientific  papacy,5 
of  a  scientific  hell  and  inquisition,6  of  resurrection  and 

1  Avenir  de  la  science,  108.  a  Ibid.,  37. 

8  Nouvelle  correspondance,  123.          *  Avenir  de  la  science,  344  and  442. 

6  Dialogues  phil.,  112.  «  Dialogues  phil.,  113  and  120. 


260  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

immortality  through  science,1  of  scientific  martyrs.2 
When  scientific  progress  is  at  stake,  he  is  even  ready 
to  resort  to  the  Jesuitical  doctrine  that  the  end  justifies 
the  means.  "Let  us  learn  not  to  be  severe  with  those 
who  have  employed  a  little  trickery  and  what  is  usually 
known  as  corruption,  if  they  really  have  as  their  object  the 
greater  good  of  humanity."3  He  promises  us  that  if  we 
imitate  him  we  may  hope  to  be,  like  himself,  sanctified 
through  science :  "  If  all  were  as  cultivated  as  I,  all 
would  be,  like  me,  happily  incapable  of  wrongdoing. 
Then  it  would  be  true  to  say  :  ye  are  gods  and  sons  of 
the  Most  High."4 

Renan  thus  has  a  special  gift  for  surrounding  science 
with  an  atmosphere  of  religious  emotion.  Like  Lucre- 
tius of  old,  he  lends  to  analysis  an  imaginative  splendor 
that  it  does  not  in  itself  possess.  In  this  way,  he  at- 
tracts many  who  would  have  been  repelled  by  a  hard 
and  dry  positivism.  They  can  have  in  reading  him  the 
pleasant  illusion  that,  after  all,  they  are  making  no 
serious  sacrifice  in  substituting  science  for  religion. 
"  God,  Providence,  soul,"  says  Renan,  "  good  old  words, 
a  bit  clumsy,  but  expressive  and  respectable,  which  sci- 
ence will  interpret  in  a  sense  ever  more  refined,  but 
will  never  replace  to  advantage." 6  In  other  words,  all 
the  terms  of  the  old  idealism  are  to  be  retained,  but  by 
a  system  of  subtle  equivocation  they  are  to  receive  new 
meanings.  Thus  a  great  deal  is  said  about  the  "  soul," 

1  Dialogues  phU.,  134-35.  a  Ibid.,  129. 

8  Avenir  de  la  science,  351.  *  Ibid.,  476. 

6  Avenir  de  la  saience,  476,  and  Etudes  d'hist.  rel.,  419. 


RENAN  261 

but,  as  used  by  Renan,  it  has  come  to  be  a  sort  of 
function  of  the  brain.  "Those  will  understand  me  who 
have  once  breathed  the  air  of  the  other  world  and 
tasted  the  nectar  of  the  ideal."  l  When  this  is  taken  in 
connection  with  the  whole  passage  where  it  occurs,  we 
discover  that  "  tasting  the  nectar  of  the  ideal "  does 
not  signify  much  more  than  reading  a  certain  number 
of  German  monographs.  Men,  he  tells  us,  are  immortal, 
—  that  is,  "  in  their  works,"  or  "  in  the  memory  of 
those  who  have  loved  them,"  or  "in  the  memory  of 
God."2  Elsewhere  we  learn  that  by  God  he  means 
merely  the  "  category  of  the  ideal."  By  a  further  atten- 
uation, the  ideal  has  ceased  to  be  the  immediate  per- 
sonal perception  of  a  spiritual  order  superior  to  the 
phenomenal  world  —  of  idealism  in  this  sense  there  is 
more  in  one  sentence  of  Emerson  than  in  scores  of 
pages  of  Renan.  It  is  simply  the  faith  in  scientific 
progress  reinforced,  as  we  have  seen,  in  his  own  case, 
by  a  religious  sensibility  of  unusual  depth  and  richness. 
His  creed,  as  he  himself  formulates  it,  is  "  the  cult  of 
the  ideal,  the  negation  of  the  supernatural,  the  experi- 
mental search  for  truth." 3  In  spite  of  the  first  article 
of  this  creed,  Renan  is  like  other  positivists  in  his  ex- 
treme distrust  of  the  unaided  insight  or  intuition  of  the 
individual.  We  should  note  how  careful  he  is  to  rest 
his  revolt  from  Catholicism,  not  on  the  testimony  of  the 
reason  or  the  conscience,  but  on  the  outer  fact.4 

The  belief  was  once  held,  and  in  France  with  a  firmer 

1  Avenir  de  la  science,  56.  2  Dialogues  phU.,  139. 

8  Dialogues  phil.,  1.  *  See  Souvenirs,  250  and  297  f. 


262  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

assurance  than  elsewhere,  that  truth  might  be  attained 
by  abstract  reasoning.  In  Malebranche's  dialogue,  The- 
odore and  Ariste  shut  themselves  up  in  their  room  with 
drawn  curtains  so  as  to  consult  more  effectually  the 
inner  oracle,  and  then  start  out  from  this  luminous 
proposition:  Le  neant  n'a  point  de  proprietes.  Renan, 
for  his  part,  will  be  satisfied  with  nothing  less  than  the 
entire  overthrow  of  apriorism  and  metaphysical  assump- 
tion. He  regards  "the  slightest  bit  of  scientific  research" 
as  more  to  the  purpose  than  "  fifty  years  of  metaphys- 
ical meditation." l  To  be  sure,  every  man  has  a  right  to 
his  philosophy,  but  this  philosophy  is  only  his  personal 
dream  of  the  infinite,  and  has  no  objective  value  apart 
from  the  scientific  data  it  happens  to  contain.2  Super- 
ficial readers  of  Renan  are  disconcerted  when  they  learn 
that  nothing  he  had  done  gave  him  so  much  satisfaction 
as  his  "  Corpus  Inscriptionum  Semiticarum," 3  the  most 
aridly  erudite  of  all  his  works,  the  one  into  which  he  has 
put  the  least  of  himself,  according  to  ordinary  standards. 
But  what,  Renan  might  reply,  is  a  mere  dream  of  the  in- 
finite, however  artistically  expressed,  compared  with  the 
honor  of  contributing  even  a  single  brick  to  that  edifice 
of  positive  knowledge  which  is  being  reared  by  science, 
and  is  destined  to  take  the  place  of  the  air-palaces  of 
the  metaphysicians? 

Renan  is  careful,  then,  to  found  his  study  of  man 
not  on  introspection,  but  on  the  positive  evidence  of 

1  Avenir  de  la  science,  163.  2  Dialogues phil.,  240,  etc. 

8  A  bit  of  paper  found  in  Renan's  desk  after  bis  deatb  had  written 
upon  it:  "De  tout  ce  que  j'ai  fait,  c'est  le  Corpus  que  j'aime  le  mieux." 


RENAN  263 

history  and  language.  "  There  is  no  science  of  the  in- 
dividual soul." *  This  one  phrase  contains  the  denial  of 
the  old  religion  and  psychology ;  but  he  offers  to  substi- 
tute for  this  traditional  idea  of  human  nature  a  definite 
image  of  humanity  as  it  is  revealed  in  its  past.  "  The 
only  science  of  a  being  in  a  constant  state  of  develop- 
ment is  its  history." 2  History,  therefore,  rises  at  once 
into  immense  importance  as  the  means  by  which  man 
is  to  arrive  at  the  necessary  truths  about  his  own  nature. 

D 

Renan  himself  was  so  admirably  endowed  for  his- 
torical study  that  in  thus  exalting  it  he  may  be  sus- 
pected of  viewing  life  too  exclusively  from  the  angle 
of  his  own  special  faculty.  "All  the  misfortunes  of 
men,"  says  the  dancing-master  in  Moliere,  "all  the 
fatal  reverses  that  fill  the  world's  annals,  the  blunders 
of  statesmen  and  the  shortcomings  of  great  captains 
arise  from  not  knowing  how  to  dance."  We  cannot, 
however,  easily  overrate  the  importance  of  the  revolu- 
tion that  took  place  early  in  the  last  century  in  the 
manner  of  understanding  history.  Renan  himself  was 
one  of  the  first  to  see  in  this  new  historical  sense  the 
chief  acquisition  and  distinctive  originality  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.3  "History,"  says  Sainte-Beuve,  "  that 
general  taste  and  aptitude  of  our  age,  falls  heir,  in  ef- 
fect, to  all  the  other  branches  of  human  culture."4  A 
few  believers  in  direct  vision,  like  Emerson,  protested: 

1  Dialogues  phil.,  265.  *  Avenir  de  la  science,  132. 

1  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  104.       *  N.  lundis,  I,  103. 


264  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

"  Our  age  is  retrospective.  It  builds  the  sepulchres  of 
the  fathers.  It  writes  biographies,  histories,  and  criti- 
cisms." But  in  this  matter  Emerson's  voice  was  that  of 
one  crying  in  the  wilderness.  The  fascination  of  what 
he  calls  "  masquerading  in  the  faded  wardrobe  of  the 
past "  has  made  itself  felt  more  and  more,  until  it  has 
come,  in  such  forms  as  the  historical  novel,  to  appeal  to 
the  veriest  Philistine. 

In  itself,  this  imaginative  and  sympathetic  under- 
standing of  the  past  was  worth  acquiring,  even  at  the 
cost  of  some  one-sidedness.  The  old-fashioned  historian 
had  an  entirely  inadequate  notion  of  the  variable  ele- 
ment in  human  nature.  He  had  before  him  in  writing 
a  sort  of  image  of  man  in  the  abstract  which  he  sup- 
posed to  hold  good  for  all  particular  men  "from  China 
to  Peru " ;  he  used  very  similar  terms  in  speaking  of 
Louis  XIV  and  a  king  of  the  Merovingian  dynasty, 
and  judged  them  in  the  main  by  the  same  standard.  A 
historian  like  Renan,  on  the  contrary,  uses  all  his  art 
in  bringing  out  the  differences  that  separate  men  in 
time  and  space.  He  has  little  to  say  about  man  in  gen- 
eral, but  he  makes  us  feel  the  ways  in  which  an  Athen- 
ian of  the  time  of  the  Antonines  had  ceased  to  resem- 
ble an  Athenian  of  the  age  of  Pericles,  how  the  mental 
attitude  of  a  Greek  differed  from  that  of  a  Jew,  in 
what  respects  an  inhabitant  of  Rome  was  unlike  an 
inhabitant  of  Antioch.  "The  essence  of  criticism,"  he 
tells  us,  "is  the  ability  to  enter  into  modes  of  life 
different  from  our  own."  '•  In  this  definition  he  favors 

1  Souvtnirt,  87. 


RENAN  265 

once  more  his  own  talent,  which  excels  in  nothing  so 
much  as  in  seizing  and  rendering  the  finest  shades  of 
thought  and  feeling,  in  making  the  most  subtle  dis- 
tinctions. He  has  in  a  high  degree  what  he  himself 
calls  "the  direct  intuition  of  the  sentiments  and  pas- 
sions of  the  past." l  For  this  gift  of  historical  divination 
there  is  needed,  in  addition  to  exact  scholarship,  a  per- 
fect blending  of  those  feminine  powers  of  comprehen- 
sion and  sympathy  to  which  Goethe  has  paid  tribute  at 
the  end  of  the  second  Faust.  Renan  himself  is  fond  of 
insisting  on  this  feminine  side  of  his  nature.  "  I  have 
been  reared  by  women  and  priests.  In  this  fact  lies  the 
-explanation  both  of  my  virtues  and  my  faults.  ...  In 
my  manner  of  feeling  I  am  three-fourths  a  woman."2 
Elsewhere  he  ascribes  this  predominance  of  feminine 
traits  to  the  entire  Celtic  race,  and  especially  to  his  own 
branch  of  it.3 

With  his  native  aptitude  for  noting  minute  changes, 
Renan  was  peculiarly  fitted  to  receive  the  new  theories 
of  evolution.  The  German  scholarship  and  speculation, 
which  he  did  so  much  to  make  known  in  France,  are 
permeated  by  this  idea  of  gradual  growth  and  develop- 
ment. The  old  psychology  had  studied  man  from  the 
static  point  of  view  ;  in  the  philosophy  of  Renan,  even 
God  evolves.  For  him,  the  great  modern  achievement 
is  to  "  have  substituted  the  category  of  becoming  for 
the  category  of  being,  the  conception  of  the  relative 

1  Etsais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  110. 

2  Feuilles  detachers,  pp.  m-mi.  Cf .  also  Souvenirs,  113  f. 
1  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  385. 


266  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

for  the  conception  of  the  absolute,  movement  for  im- 
mobility."1 One  who  has  found,  like  Renan,  how  much 
may  be  explained  by  the  historical  method,  is  tempted 
to  use  it  to  explain  everything.  He  is  curiously  loath  to 
grant  that  a  work  of  art,  for  example,  may  be  valuable 
by  virtue  of  its  universal  human  truth,  and  not  simply 
as  the  mirror  of  a  particular  type  of  man  or  civilization. 
"  It  is  not  Homer  who  is  beautiful,"  he  says,  "  but 
Homeric  life,  the  phase  in  the  existence  of  humanity 
described  by  Homer."  "If  the  Ossianic  hymns  of  Mac- 
pherson  were  authentic,  we  should  have  to  place  them 
alongside  of  Homer;  as  soon  as  it  is  proved  that  they 
are  by  a  poet  of  the  eighteenth  century,  they  have 
only  a  very  trifling  value." 2  Renan's  historical  finesse 
does  not  compare  favorably  here  with  the  vigorous  good 
sense  of  Dr.  Johnson,  who  remarks  characteristically  of 
Ossian  :  "  Sir,  a  man  might  write  such  stuff  forever  if 
he  would  only  abandon  his  mind  to  it." 

It  would  be  possible  to  multiply  passages  from  Renan 
to  show  that  his  attitude  towards  literature  is  not  pri- 
marily literary  but  historical  or  philological.  He  con- 
fesses that  he  valued  literature  for  a  time  only  to  please 
Sainte-Beuve,  who  had  had  a  great  deal  of  influence 
upon  him.3  No  worse  heresy  from  the  point  of  view  of 
the  lover  of  letters  was  ever  uttered  than  when  Renan 
said  that  "  literary  history  is  destined  to  take  the  place 
in  great  part  of  the  direct  reading  of  the  works  of  the 
human  spirit"  ;4  or  when  he  declared  that  he  would  "ex- 

1  Averroes,  p.  ii.  »  Ibid.,  190  f. 

8  Souvenirs,  354.  *  Avenir  de  la  science,  226. 


KENAN  267 

change  all  the  beautiful  prose  of  Livy  for  some  of  the 
documents  that  he  had  before  his  eyes  in  writing  his 

history."1 

in 

It  was  Kenan's  ambition,  however,  to  be  something 
more  than  a  mere  historian  and  philologist.  It  should 
be  remembered  that  the  second  article  of  his  creed  is 
the  negation  of  the  supernatural,  "that  strange  disease," 
as  he  describes  it  elsewhere,  "  that  to  the  shame  of  civil- 
ization has  not  yet  disappeared  from  humanity."2  All 
his  early  training  had  turned  him  towards  the  study  of 
religion.  After  his  conversion  from  Catholicism  to  sci- 
ence, there  was  superadded  the  desire  to  apply  his  new 
faith,  to  prove  that  the  positive  methods  of  history  and 
philology  are  adequate  to  explain  what  has  always  been 
held  to  be  wholly  beyond  them.  Religion  assumes  that 
there  is  a  realm  of  mystery  into  which  the  ordinary  rea- 
son is  unable  to  enter.  There  can  be  no  real  triumph 
for  the  rationalist  until  this  main  assumption  of  religion 
is  attacked  and  discredited.  It  was  with  all  this  in  mind 
that  Kenan  wrote  when  a  very  young  man  :  "  The  most 
important  book  of  the  nineteenth  century  should  have 
as  its  title  *  A  Critical  History  of  the  Origins  of  Christ- 
ianity.' " 3  Kenan  devoted  over  thirty  years  of  his  own 
life  to  the  accomplishment  of  this  great  task.  The  result 
is  embodied  in  the  seven  volumes  of  his  "  Origines  du 
Christianisme,"  and  the  five  complementary  volumes  of 
his  "Histoire  du  peuple  d'Israel."  These  works,  though 

1  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  36.  9  Ibid.,  48. 

8  Avenir  de  la  science,  279. 


268  MODEKN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

not  perhaps  the  most  important  of  the  century,  are,  at 
all  events,  the  most  considerable  that  have  appeared  in 
France  for  one  or  two  generations. 

It  is  quite  beyond  the  scope  of  the  present  study  to 
discuss  in  detail  Kenan's  treatment  of  the  grave  ques- 
tions that  necessarily  confront  a  historian  of  Christianity. 
The  method  of  this  treatment  is  evidently  borrowed  from 
Germany.  He  has  pressed  the  French  talent  for  expres- 
sion into  the  service  of  German  research,  and  thrown 
into  general  circulation  ideas  that  had  previously  been 
the  property  of  a  few  specialists.  German  scholars,  how- 
ever, had  left  to  scriptural  exegesis  at  least  a  semblance 
of  special  privilege.  Kenan's  work  is  significant  by  the 
very  boldness  with  which  he  abolishes  the  distinction 
between  sacred  and  profane  learning,  and  puts  the  nar- 
ratives of  the  Old  and  New  Testaments  on  precisely  the 
same  footing  as  those  of  Livy  and  Herodotus.  The  Bible, 
instead  of  being  absolutely  inspired  and  all  of  a  piece, 
thus  becomes  purely  human  and  historical  and  bears 
the  impress  of  all  the  changing  circumstances  of  time 
and  place.  The  book  of  Ecclesiastes  was  once  thought 
to  be  the  word  of  God;  Kenan  sees  in  it  only  the  "phi- 
losophy of  a  disillusioned  old  bachelor." 1 

It  is  usual  to  contrast  this  historical  method  of  Kenan 
with  the  irreligion  of  the  eighteenth  century,  founded 
entirely  on  reasoning  and  often  as  intolerant  in  temper 
as  the  dogma  it  attacked.  This  temper  is  well  exemplified 
by  Voltaire's  warfare  upon  the  supernatural,  especially 
by  the  famous  watchword  of  his  crusade  upon  Catholi- 

1  Dialogues  phil.t  27. 


RENAN  269 

cism,  Ecrasez  Tinfame.  The  militant  atheism  of  former 
times  was,  as  has  often  been  remarked,  a  sort  of  inverted 
faith.  "  There  is  no  God,  and  Harriet  Martineau  is  his 
prophet."  We  can  accept  the  contrast  between  Kenan 
and  this  type  of  disbeliever,  provided  we  remember  that 
Kenan's  philosophy  also  carried  with  it  no  small  share 
of  dogmatic  rationalism,  and  something,  too,  of  the 
mocking  irreverence  that  in  France,  at  all  events,  nearly 
always  accompanies  it.  This  element  comes  to  the  sur- 
face more  and  more  as  he  grows  older.  There  are  even 
moments  when  he  deserves  the  epithet  his  enemies  have 
given  him,  —  that  of  an  "  unctuous  Voltaire."  This  flip- 
pancy in  dealing  with  religious  matters  is  often  amusing 
enough  in  itself,  but  one  would  have  preferred  to  see  a 
man  like  Kenan  follow  the  counsel  of  the  ancient  sage 
and  "not  speculate  about  the  highest  things  in  light- 
ness of  heart." 

We  cannot  be  too  careful  to  distinguish  these  differ- 
ent elements  in  a  nature  as  complex  as  Kenan's.  He 
has  some  points  in  common  with  Voltaire,  and  still 
more  with  the  critics  of  Germany.  On  the  other  hand, 
he  resembles  by  his  sentimental  cult  for  Christianity  a 
Catholic  apologist  like  Chateaubriand.  It  was  to  this 
last  trait  that  he  owed  much  of  his  power  to  influence 
his  own  generation.  For  religion,  even  after  it  has  lost 
all  effective  hold  on  the  reason  and  character,  still  lin- 
gers in  the  sensibility.  When  it  has  ceased  to  appeal  to 
us  as  truth,  it  continues  to  appeal  to  us  as  beauty.  As 
Kenan  puts  it,  "We  are  offended  by  the  dogmas  of 
Catholicism  and  delighted  by  its  old  churches."  *  We 

1  Dialogues  phU.,  328. 


270  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

are  thrilled  with  emotion  by  mediaeval  architecture,  by 
the  poetry  of  Christian  rites  and  ceremonies,  by  the 
odor  of  incense,  or,  like  Renan  himself,  by  the  Canticles 
to  the  Virgin.1  This  mood  may  be  termed  religiosity, 
and  is  not  to  be  confused  with  real  religion,  with  which 
it  has  no  necessary  connection. 

Renan,  then,  came  at  the  precise  moment  when  men 
were  most  divided  between  this  sentimental  yearning 
towards  the  past  and  their  intellectual  acceptance  of  the 
new  order.  The  heart  refused  to  acquiesce  in  the  con- 
clusions of  the  head.  This  struggle  between  the  head 
and  the  heart  was  especially  common  towards  the  mid- 
dle of  the  century,  so  much  so  that,  according  to  Sainte- 
Beuve,  it  had  become  a  fashionable  pose.2 

"  Ma  raison  rdvolt^e 
Essaie  en  vain  de  croire  et  mon  cceur  de  douter."  * 

The  religious  sentiment  had  still  been  strong  enough 
in  the  case  of  Chateaubriand  and  a  considerable  num- 
ber of  his  contemporaries  to  carry  with  it  the  reluctant 
reason.  But  fifty  years  later  the  balance  had  turned  in 
favor  of  the  modern  spirit,  and  many  men  were  pre- 
paring to  bid  the  religious  forms  of  the  past  a  tender 
and  regretful  farewell.  Renan  is  their  spokesman  when 
he  says  that  "  the  belief  we  have  had  should  never  be  a 
bond.  We  have  paid  our  debt  to  it  when  we  have  care- 
fully wrapped  it  in  the  purple  shroud  in  which  slumber 
the  gods  that  are  dead." 4  He  sets  out  then  in  his 

1  Souvenirs,  65.  *  N.  lundis,  v,  14. 

8  Alfred  de  Musset,  L'Espoir  en  Dieu.    See  also  for  the  same  mood 
parts  of  Musseb's  Rolla.  *  Souvenirs,  72. 


KENAN  271 

"  Origines  "  to  weave  the  shroud  of  Christianity,  and 
to  give  it  —  so  far  as  it  implies  faith  in  the  supernat- 
ural —  a  sympathetic  and  respectful  burial.  We  have 
already  spoken  of  the  faculty  that  specially  fitted  him 
for  this  enterprise.  No  one  knew  better  than  he  how 
to  gild  positivism  with  religiosity  and  throw  around 
the  operations  of  the  scientific  intellect  a  vague  aroma 
of  the  infinite.  H  donne  aux  hommes  de  sa  genera- 
tion ce  qu'ils  desirent,  des  bonbons  qui  sentent  I'infini.1 
Religion  that  has  thus  taken  refuge  in  the  sensibility 
becomes  largely  a  matter  of  literary  and  artistic  enjoy- 
ment. This  is  evidently  so  in  the  case  of  Chateau- 
briand, and  it  is  not  difficult  to  detect  in  Renan  the 
same  epicurean  flavor.  He  tells  us  that  he  has  a  "  keen 
relish  " 2  for  the  character  of  the  founder  of  Christian- 
ity. He  speaks  in  another  passage  of  "  savoring  the  de- 
lights of  the  religious  sentiment."  3  Perhaps  nothing 
so  offends  the  serious  reader  of  the  "  Vie  de  Jesus  "  as 
Renan's  assumption  that  the  highest  praise  he  can  give 
Jesus  is  to  say  that  he  satisfies  the  aesthetic  sense.  He 
multiplies  in  speaking  of  him  such  adjectives  as  doux, 
beau,  exquis,  charmant,  ravissant,  delicieux. 

But  we  have  just  seen  that  this  religiosity,  however 
little  it  may  be  to  our  liking,  was  exactly  suited  to  the 
taste  of  a  large  contemporary  public.  It  was  the  time- 
liness of  the  "  Vie  de  Jesus,"  even  more  than  its  in- 
trinsic merit,  that  won  for  it  its  extraordinary  success, 

1  Dondan,  Lettres,  TV,  143.    The  whole  passage  on  Renan  and  his  time 
is  worth  reading. 

2  Souvenirs,  312.  «  Avenir  de  la  science,  248. 


272  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

and  made  of  its  publication,  as  Scherer  has  said,  "  one 
of  the  events  of  the  century."  l  Sixty  thousand  copies 
of  the  work  were  called  for  in  the  first  five  months, 
and  it  was  soon  translated  into  many  languages.  The 
orthodox,  Protestants  as  well  as  Catholics,  saw  in  it,  in 
spite  of  the  outward  forms  of  respect  in  which  it 
clothed  itself,  the  most  insidious  and  deadly  attack 
that  religion  had  yet  sustained,  and  within  a  year  or 
two  of  its  appearance  hundreds  of  books,  pamphlets 
and  magazine  articles  had  been  poured  forth  in  reply.2 
The  Bishop  of  Marseilles  had  the  church  bells  tolled 
every  afternoon  at  three  against  Renan,  the  Anti- 
christ; Pope  Pius  IX  called  him  the  "European  blas- 
phemer." In  some  cases  polemic  was  reinforced  by 
calumny.  Thus  it  was  reported  that  the  wealthy  Jew, 
M.  de  Rothschild,  had  paid  Renan  a  bribe  of  a  million 
francs  for  writing  his  attack  on  Christianity.8 

Without  venturing  into  this  dangerous  region  of 
theological  controversy,  we  can  see  at  this  distance  that 
Renan  is  not  at  his  best  in  the  "  Vie  de  Jesus."  Some 
would  go  even  further,  and  say,  in  the  words  of  Fleury, 
that  "  any  one  who  thinks  he  can  improve  on  the  Gospel 
narrative  does  not  understand  it."  Renan  chiefly  ex- 
cels in  rendering,  by  his  art  of  delicate  shadings,  the 
element  of  relativity  in  the  records  of  the  past ;  whereas 
Jesus,  as  Arnold  expresses  it,  "is,  in  the  jargon  of 
modern  philosophy,  an  absolute;  we  cannot  explain, 

1  Etudes  sur  la  litterature  contemporaine,  vra,  108. 
2  For  a  partial  list  see  Milsand,  Bibliographic  des  publications  relative! 
au  livre  de  M.  Renan,  Vie  de  Jesus  (1864). 
8  Feuittes  detachees,  p.  xxii. 


KENAN  273 

cannot  get  behind  him  and  above  him,  cannot  command 
him."  The  historical  method  is  most  serviceable  when 
it  is  brought  to  bear  on  a  work  like  the  Apocalypse,  or 
on  an  event  like  the  persecution  of  Nero.  But  it  is  not 
what  is  needed  to  make  us  feel  the  sheer  spiritual  ele- 
vation of  Jesus.  It  fails  as  conspicuously  as  it  does 
when  applied  by  Taine,  in  his  "  English  Literature,"  to  the 
eminent  personality  of  Shakespeare.  Neither  Jesus,  nor 
Shakespeare,  it  would  seem,  is  to  be  accounted  for  by 
any  theory  of  environment,  or  by  the  convergent  effect 
of  any  number  of  "  influences." 

Kenan's  age  resembled  our  own  in  that  it  was  ex- 
traordinarily strong  in  its  sense  of  what  the  individual 
owes  to  society,  and  extraordinarily  weak  in  its  sense  of 
what  he  owes  to  himself ;  and  so,  in  obedience  to  the 
time-spirit,  Renan  reduces  the  mission  of  Jesus,  so  far 
as  possible,  to  sentimental  and  humanitarian  effusions. 
The  masculine  religion  of  the  will  is  almost  entirely 
sacrificed  in  his  narrative  to  the  feminine  religion  of 
the  heart.  But,  as  Sainte-Beuve  remarks,  two  great  fam- 
ilies of  Christians  may  be  distinguished  from  the  first  — 
on  the  one  hand  the  "gentle  and  the  tender,"  and  on 
the  other  the  "  resolute  and  the  strong."  l  The  traits 
that  were  thus  separated  in  the  followers  were  united  in 
the  founder.  As  a  result  of  Kenan's  failure  to  recog- 
nize this  fact,  there  is  a  real  incoherency  in  his  picture 
of  Jesus.  It  is  not  made  clear  to  us  how  the  "  delicate 
and  amiable  moralist"  of  Galilee  becomes  the  "sombre 
giant  of  the  last  days." 

1  Port-Royal,  I,  217. 


274  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Kenan  can  scarcely  conceal  his  dislike  for  Saint 
Paul,  whose  interest  is  evidently  centred  in  the  spiritual 
life  of  the  individual,  and  who  cannot,  by  any  device 
of  historical  interpretation,  be  made  into  a  humani- 
tarian. He  calls  him  the  second  founder  of  Christianity, 
but  he  has  little  sympathy  for  the  distinctive  features 
of  the  Pauline  religion,  its  haunting  sense  of  sin  and 
the  stress  it  lays  on  the  struggle  between  a  lower  and 
a  higher  self,  between  a  law  of  the  flesh  and  a  law 
of  the  spirit.  "  Wretched  man  that  I  am ! "  exclaims 
Saint  Paul,  "  who  shall  deliver  me  from  the  body  of 
this  death?"  Renan,  for  his  part,  likes  to  remind  us 
that  he  is  the  fellow  countryman  of  the  Breton  Pelagius, 
who  taught,  in  opposition  to  the  orthodox  church 
fathers,  the  natural  goodness  of  human  nature.  A 
Christian  (in  the  old-fashioned  sense  of  the  term)  would 
see  in  all  this  a  proof  that  Renan  was  lacking  in  some 
of  the  essentials  of  the  inner  life.  It  is,  at  all  events,  a 
curious  example  of  his  determination  to  view  everything 
from  the  narrow  angle  of  philology.  "  I  confess,"  he 
says,  "  that  the  dogma  of  original  sin  is  the  one  for 
which  I  have  least  relish.  There  is  no  other  dogma  that 
rests  like  it  on  a  needle's  point.  The  story  of  the  sin  of 
Adam  is  in  only  one  of  the  two  versions  which  alter- 
nate with  one  another  in  making  up  the  book  of  Genesis. 
If  the  Elohistic  version  alone  had  come  down  to  us, 
there  would  be  no  original  sin.  The  Jehovistic  story  of 
the  fall  .  .  .  was  never  noticed  by  the  ancient  people  of 
Israel.  Paul  first  drew  from  it  the  frightful  dogma  which 
for  centuries  has  filled  humanity  with  gloom  and  terror." 1 

1  Feuilles  detachees,  375-76. 


RENAN  275 

Kenan's  positivism  is  also  well  illustrated  by  his  atti- 
tude towards  miracles.  He  is  nowhere  so  dogmatic  as  in 
the  confidence  with  which  he  decides  what  is  "  natural  " 
and  what  is  "  supernatural,"  and  rejects  forthwith  every- 
thing that  cannot  be  properly  tested  in  the  laboratory 
of  M.  Berthelot.  As  though,  with  our  infinitesimal  frag- 
ment of  experience,  we  really  knew  whether  the  ordi- 
nary "  law  "  may  not  be  at  times  superseded  and  held 
in  abeyance  by  a  higher  "  law " !  In  the  "  Vie  de 
Jesus"  he  occasionally  resorts  to  the  theory  of  pious 
fraud.  Much  scandal  was  caused  by  his  suggestion  that 
Lazarus  deliberately  planned  and  acted  out  the  scene  of 
his  coming  to  life  with  a  view  to  increasing  Christ's 
fame  as  a  thaumaturgist.  Elsewhere  he  inclines  rather 
to  see  in  the  miraculous  the  distortion  of  some  natural 
incident.  For  example,  the  story  of  the  Pentecost  and 
the  tongues  of  fire  probably  had  its  origin  in  the  light- 
ning flashes  of  a  violent  thunderstorm.1  Paul,  overcome 
by  heat  and  fatigue,  was  suffering  from  cerebral  con- 
gestion, accompanied  by  an  attack  of  ophthalmia,  and 
so  imagined  that  he  met  Jesus  on  the  road  to  Damascus.2 
The  doctrine  of  the  resurrection  —  one,  as  Renan  says, 
in  which  the  whole  future  of  Christianity  was  involved 
—  grew  out  of  a  hallucination  of  Mary  Magdalene,3  etc. 

Positivist  though  he  is  in  all  these  ways,  Renan  still 
retains  in  his  thought  many  traces  of  the  romanticism 
he  was  so  careful  to  banish  from  his  style.  Hence  an 
occasional  lack  of  objectivity  and  inability  to  get  away 
from  himself,  a  tendency  to  honor  the  historical  person- 

1  Les  Apotres,  62.  «  Ibid.,  180  ff.  «  Ibid.,  8  S. 


276  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ages  whom  he  admires  by  ascribing  to  them  his  own 
qualities.  He  has  put  many  of  his  own  traits  into  his 
portraits  of  Jesus  and  Marcus  Aurelius.  He  himself 
inclines  more  and  more  to  ironical  detachment,  and  is 
unwilling  to  think  that  Jesus  could  have  been  denied 
the  same  superiority.  "  Jesus  had  in  the  highest  degree 
what  we  regard  as  the  essential  virtue  of  a  distinguished 
person  —  I  mean  the  gift  of  smiling  at  his  own  work, 
of  rising  superior  to  it,  of  not  allowing  himself  to  be 
haunted  by  it."  l  Renan  pursues  his  romantic  dream 
through  the  outer  circumstance  and  sometimes  subor- 
dinates the  outer  circumstance  to  it.  In  his  unsuccessful 
electoral  campaign  of  1869,  only  a  year  before  the 
Franco-Prussian  War,  he  advised  a  reduction  of  the 
army.  A  real  statesman  would  have  sacrificed  his  hu- 
manitarian vision  of  peace,  in  case  he  happened  to  have 
one,  to  the  actual  danger  of  war  which  was  already 
patent  to  a  careful  observer.  The  Celtic  race,  according 
to  Renan,  has  ever  tended  to  "take  its  dreams  for 
realities."  "  The  essential  element  of  the  poetical  life  of 
the  Celt  is  adventure,  that  is  to  say,  the  pursuit  of  the 
unknown,  the  unending  quest  after  the  ever-fleeting 
object  of  desire." 2  Renan  himself  has  found  a  relation 
between  these  racial  traits  and  his  own  romanticism 
and  love  of  intellectual  adventure.  He  arrives  at  few 
certainties  in  his  studies  on  religion,  but  he  makes  up 
for  these  gaps  in  our  positive  information  by  a  surpris- 
ing fertility  in  hypothesis.  There  is  something  stimu- 
lating in  the  very  freedom  with  which  he  handles  ideas 

1  L'Antechrist,  102.  a  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  386. 


RENAN  277 

and  events,  or,  as  some  might  say,  in  his  lack  of  intel- 
lectual prudence  and  sobriety.  A  person  intellectually 
prudent  can  only  marvel  at  the  boldness  with  which 
Renan  and  Taine  launch  forth  into  some  subject  like 
Buddhism l  —  vast,  obscure,  imperfectly  known  as  yet 
even  to  the  specialist  —  and  reduce  it  all  to  a  few  gen- 
eralizations as  fallacious  often  as  they  are  plausible. 
"  Nature,"  says  Emerson,  "  resents  generalizing,  and 
insults  the  philosopher  in  every  moment  with  a  million 
of  fresh  particulars."  Renan,  who  has  made  popular  so 
many  ideas  on  race  psychology,  especially  on  the  psy- 
chology of  the  Semite,  asserts,  among  other  things, 
that  the  "  desert  is  monotheistic."  Yet  the  "particulars" 
that  tend  to  disprove  this  statement  were  collected  dur- 
ing his  own  lifetime  and  embodied  in  the  "  Corpus  "  of 
which  he  himself  was  the  founder. 

It  is  instructive  to  compare  Renan's  method  with 
that  of  a  real  skeptic  like  Sainte-Beuve,  to  note  Sainte- 
Beuve's  care  to  select  a  subject  that  involves  no  leap 
into  unknown  places,  and  then  the  invincible  caution 
with  which  he  advances,  exploring  every  foot  of  the 
way.  To  hear  Renan  speak  of  Saint  Paul  one  would 
imagine  that  he  had  known  him  personally.  This  "ugly 
little  Jew,"  as  he  informs  us,  "was  short  of  stature, 
thickset,  and  bent.  He  had  a  small,  bald  head,  oddly 
set  on  heavy  shoulders.  His  pale  face  was  almost  over- 
grown by  a  thick  beard ;  he  had  an  aquiline  nose,  keen 
eyes,  black  eyebrows  that  met  over  the  forehead."2 

1  Kenan's  essay  on  Buddhism  is  contained  in  his  Nouvelles  etudes  d'his- 
toire  religieuse  •  that  of  Taine  in  his  Nouveaux  essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire. 

2  Souvenirs,  66,  and  Les  Apotres,  170. 


278  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Sainte-Beuve  had  seen  Chateaubriand  for  a  number  of 
years  in  the  drawing-room  of  Madame  Recamier,  yet  he 
devotes  a  special  appendix  of  his  work  on  Chateau- 
briand to  discussing  the  color  of  his  eyes,  and  then 
only  to  arrive  at  the  melancholy  conclusion  that  we 
must  be  resigned  to  say  of  Chateaubriand's  eyes  as  of 
the  color  of  Mary  Stuart's  hair  and  so  many  other 
things :  Que  sais-je  ? l 

But  we  must  not  linger  so  long  on  these  doubtful 
aspects  of  Kenan's  genius  as  to  forget  the  ways  in 
which  he  is  really  eminent.  Future  historians  of  Christ- 
ianity may  arrive  at  conclusions  entirely  different  from 
his  regarding  those  events  in  its  records  that  transcend 
ordinary  human  experience.  They  may  avoid  some  of 
the  faults  that  come  from  his  romanticism  and  abuse 
of  conjecture.  But  we  can  be  sure  that  no  student  of 
the  Bible  will  be  taken  seriously  hereafter  who  is  with- 
out the  sense  of  historical  development;  and  for  im- 
parting this  historical  sense,  Kenan  is,  as  we  have  seen, 
an  incomparable  master. 

IV 

Kenan  was  so  ardent  a  believer  in  evolution  that  it 
is  only  fair  to  apply  to  him  his  own  method,  and  inquire 
in  what  way  he  himself  evolved.  He  describes  himself  in 
his  autobiography  as  a  "bundle  of  contradictions."2 
One  of  the  contradictions  which  he  possibly  had  in  his 
mind  is  that  between  the  end  of  his  life  and  its  begin- 
ning. Some  allusions  have  already  been  made  to  the 

1  Chateaubriand  et  son  groupe  litteraire,  n,  404.  *  Souvenirs,  73. 


KENAN  279 

character  of  this  change.  Renan  had  always  been  abun- 
dantly provided  with  the  cheerfulness  that  is  one  of  the 
marks  of  a  rich  and  resourceful  nature ;  but  this  cheer- 
fulness is  something  quite  distinct  from  the  ironical 
"  gavety  "  of  his  °1<1  age>  in  such  striking  contrast  with 
the  serious,  almost  solemn  tone  of  a  youthful  work  like 
"L'Avenir  de  la  science."  In  one  of  the  articles  of  this 
early  period  he  makes  an  indignant  attack  on  Beranger 
for  his  cult  of  the  Dieu  des  bonnes  gens,  the  easy- 
going divinity  who  smiles  indulgently  on  the  failings 
of  Gallic  human  nature.1  At  about  the  same  time,  he 
refers  to  gayety  as  that  "  strange  forgetf ulness  of  the 
human  lot " ; 2  and  so  we  are  surprised  when  he  an- 
nounces to  us  some  twenty  years  later  that,  after  all, 
this  "  ancient  Gallic  gayety  is  perhaps  the  profoundest 
of  philosophies."  In  a  public  address,  he  exhorts  his 
hearers  to  "  teach  all  nations  to  laugh  in  French.  It  is 
the  sanest  and  most  philosophical  thing  in  the  world. 
French  comic  songs  are  good  too.  I  once  said  hard 
things  about  the  Dieu  des  bonnes  gens;  mon  Dieu, 
how  mistaken  I  was.  .  .  .  Did  not  someone  say  that 
God  took  more  pleasure  in  the  oaths  of  a  French  sol- 
dier than  in  the  prayers  of  the  ministers  of  certain 
Puritan  sects?  We  enter  by  gayety  into  the  deepest 
views  of  Providence." 3 

Kenan's  own  account  of  this  change  is  simple  enough : 
he  was  of  mixed  descent,  and  the  light,  mocking  Gascon 
had  got  the  better  of  the  serious  Breton  in  his  nature.  * 

1  See  Questions  contemporaines,  461  ff.         *  Feuilles  detaehees,  263-264. 

2  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  383.          4  Souvenirs,  141. 


280  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

We  might,  however,  miss  much  of  the  significance  of 
his  life  if  we  took  this  explanation  too  seriously.  We 
should  rather  remember  that  Renan  is  a  man  over 
whose  whole  being  the  intellect  reigned  supreme,  and 
then  ask  ourselves  what  is  the  philosophy  that  goes 
with  this  predominance  of  intellect.  "  The  first  dan- 
gerous symptom  I  report,"  says  Emerson,  "  is  the  levity 
of  intellect,  as  if  it  were  fatal  to  earnestness  to  know 
much.  Knowledge  is  the  knowing  that  we  cannot  know. 
.  .  .  How  respectable  is  earnestness  on  every  platform ! 
But  intellect  kills  it."  Renan  begins  by  regarding  the 
intellect  with  religious  earnestness,  by  making  it  the 
source  of  all  certainty,  and  is  then  slowly  but  surely 
forced  by  the  logical  working-out  of  his  own  premises 
into  the  attitude  that  Emerson  describes.  In  1890  he 
still  thinks  as  in  1848  that  science  is  our  one  serious 
concern ;  but  what  a  f alling-off  there  is  in  what  he  hopes 
even  from  science!  He  no  longer  claims  that  science 
can  take  the  place  of  religion,  and  admits  that "  it  pre- 
serves us  from  error  rather  than  gives  us  the  truth."  1 
Towards  the  very  end,  he  says  in  words  that  seem  an 
echo  of  Emerson:  "We  do  not  know — that  is  all  that 
can  be  said  definitely  about  what  is  beyond  the  finite. 
Let  us  deny  nothing,  let  us  affirm  nothing,  let  us  hope."2 
"Let  us  know  how  to  wait;  possibly  there  is  nothing  at 
the  end ;  or  who  can  tell  whether  the  truth  is  not  sad  ? 
Let  us  not  be  in  such  haste  to  discover  it."3  "Every- 
thing is  possible,  even  God." 4 

1  Avenir  de  la  science,  p.  xix.  *  Feuilles  detachees,  p.  rvii. 

8  Feuilles  detachees,  p.  x.  *  Ibid.,  416. 


KENAN  281 

This  later  development  of  Renan  is,  then,  the  natural 
result  of  the  exaggerated  emphasis  he  put  from  the 
outset  on  intellect,  of  his  attempt  to  exalt  the  intellect 
into  a  position  that  belongs  only  to  the  character  and 
will.  For  whatever  importance  we  may  attach  to 
Knowledge,  we  must  say  to  her  at  last  in  the  words  of 
Tennyson :  - 

"  Let  her  know  her  place : 
She  is  the  second,  not  the  first." 

Kenan's  cult  for  knowledge  is  in  part  a  survival  of 
the  Catholic  craving  for  an  outer  authority.  For  the 
authority  of  the  church  he  substitutes  the  authority  of 
the  scientific  fact.  He  wishes  to  keep  the  ideal,  but  he 
is  unwilling  to  rest  it  on  the  bold  affirmation  of  a  prin- 
ciple in  man  superior  to  phenomenal  nature,  and  so  he 
is  forced  to  find  in  the  outer  facts  a  coherency  and 
orderly  sequence  that  he  is  forbidden  by  his  philosophy 
to  seek  in  himself.  In  other  words,  his  only  resource 
against  skepticism  is  a  philosophy  of  history.  *  All  the 
outer  facts,  the  manifold  happenings  of  the  past,  that 
seem  so  chaotic  and  unrelated  to  a  skeptic  like  Sainte- 
Beuve,  are,  he  would  have  us  believe,  "  moving  inly  to 
one  far-set  goal "  ;  this  goal  is,  of  course,  the  triumph 
of  the  scientific  reason.  The  "  primitive  "  and  instinctive 
ages  have  now  been  succeeded  by  an  age  of  conscious 
reflection  and  analysis,  and  above  this  Renan  can  im- 
agine no  more  exalted  state.  He  does  not  admit  that 
beyond  the  spontaneity  of  instinct  and  the  analytical 

1  Some  of  the  elements  of  this  philosophy  of  history  are  borrowed  from 
Hegel,  others  (especially  the  theory  of  the  primitive)  from  Herder. 


282  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

activity  of  the  intellect  there  may  lie  the  higher  spon- 
taneity of  the  soul.  He  bravely  accepts  all  the  conse- 
quences of  his  own  logic,  and  foresees  a  time  when  such 
forms  of  the  "  spontaneous "  as  art  and  poetry  and 
even  morality  in  the  ordinary  sense  will  have  disap- 
peared, and  science  will  be  all  in  all.1  At  times  he  finds 
it  hard  to  avoid  a  patronizing  tone  in  speaking  of  re- 
ligion, since,  after  all,  he  is  viewing  this  "  spontaneous  " 
creation  from  the  superior  platform  of  analysis. 

How  far  can  the  facts  be  made  to  conform  to  any 
such  theory  ?  History,  if  studied  strictly  from  the  stand- 
point of  personal  righteousness  and  the  reaction  of  this 
individual  conduct  on  the  common  welfare,  has  perhaps 
a  stern  morality  of  its  own.  A  person  who  studies  his- 
tory in  this  way  will  not  necessarily  conclude  with 
Renan,  from  the  success  of  the  English,  that  egotism  is 
alone  rewarded  in  the  actual  world,2  nor  will  he  see  in 
the  failure  of  the  Revolution  of  1848  a  proof  that  the 
ideal  is  incompatible  with  the  real.3  But,  if  we  are  to 
judge  from  Renan's  experience,  it  is  not  easy  to  have 
an  intimate  knowledge  of  the  past,  and  then  adjust  this 
knowledge  to  any  scheme  for  the  progressive  regenera- 
tion of  mankind  as  a  whole.  Then,  too,  the  facts  during 
Renan's  own  lifetime  seemed  to  take  a  perverse  pleasure 
in  running  counter  to  his  theories.  He  confesses  he 
never  recovered  from  the  pessimism  inspired  in  him  by 
the  events  of  1851  and  1870.4  Finally  he  gives  over 
altogether  the  attempt  to  read  the  ideal  into  the  real ; 

1  Dialogues  phil.,  83  f .  3  Souvenirs,  124.          8  Ibid.,  122. 

4  Ibid.,  124,  and  Dialogues  phil. ,  p.  rviii  (note). 


RENAN  283 

instead  of  dissimulating  the  immorality  of  history,  he 
exaggerates  it.  "  Things  are  getting  back  to  their  nor- 
mal state,"  says  Metius,  the  aristocrat,  towards  the  end 
of  the  "  Pretre  de  Nemi."  "  The  world  is  going  to  repose 
in  its  natural  bed,  which  is  crime.  Absurd  illusion  of 
these  meddlesome  fanatics  who  think  it  possible  to  get 
on  without  violence,  to  govern  by  reason,  to  treat  the 
people  as  a  reasonable  being.  The  world  lives  by  suc- 
cessful crimes." 

But  what  could  be  graver  than  such  an  admission  for 
one  who  like  Renan  has  no  refuge  from  the  outer  fact 
—  who  does  not  found  his  philosophy  on  the  validity 
of  the  inner  sense?  Religion,  the  former  sanction  for 
the  moral  life,  Renan  has  dissolved  by  his  analysis ;  the 
outer  fact  in  which  he  hopes  to  find  a  new  sanction  fails 
him  in  turn,  and  so  the  moral  sense  is  left  suspended  in 
the  void.  "  Let  us  make  up  our  mind  to  it,"  says  M.  Se- 
ailles,  "  the  facts  will  not  decide  for  us,  nothing  will  free 
us  from  initiative  and  from  responsibility  for  our  own 
ideas.  The  intellectual  life  of  Renan  is  an  experiment 
made  for  the  benefit  of  all ;  it  teaches  us  where  logic 
leads  a  sincere  mind,  which,  determined  to  follow  the 
truth  to  the  very  end,  looks  for  it  in  the  sole  testi- 
mony of  facts." l  If  he  is  still  virtuous,  Renan  tells  us, 
it  is  because  the  direction  given  to  his  life  by  faith 
persists  when  faith  itself  has  disappeared.2  "  We  are 
like  those  animals  whose  brains  have  been  taken  out  by 
physiologists  and  who  continue  none  the  less  certain 
functions  by  sheer  force  of  habit.  But  these  instinctive 

1  Ernest  Renan,  341.  *  Souvenirs,  12. 


284  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

movements  will  grow  weaker  in  time.  .  .  .  We  are 
living  on  the  shadow  of  a  shadow ;  what  are  people 
going  to  live  on  after  us?"1  Everything  thus  tends  to 
assume  in  the  intelligence  of  Renan  the  form  of  an  acute 
antithesis — reason  and  sentiment,2  the  classic  and  the 
romantic,3  the  real  and  the  ideal,4  science  and  morality. 
He  is  unable  to  fuse  together  and  reconcile  these  con- 
tradictory terms  in  the  light  of  a  higher  insight.  Instead 
of  choosing  between  opposite  and  equally  plausible  con- 
clusions, he  sets  "the  different  lobes  of  his  brain  to 
dialoguing "  5  about  them.  Such  a  state,  if  prolonged, 
would  lead  to  a  paralysis  of  the  will.  "  The  dead  planets 
are  perhaps  those  in  which  criticism  has  triumphed  over 
the  ruses  of  Nature ;  I  sometimes  fancy  that,  if  every- 
body attained  to  our  philosophy,  the  world  would  stop."  6 
We  must  not,  however,  take  all  this  too  literally. 
Renan  still  had  enough  faith  in  scientific  progress  to 
sustain  him  through  years  of  austere  labor  and  devo- 
tion to  duty.  Only  this  faith  has  ceased  to  be,  he  tells 
us,  anything  more  than  a  purely  personal  preference. 
The  facts  lend  themselves  about  as  readily  to  the  op- 
posite hypothesis.  For  aught  we  know  some  deception 
is  being  practised  upon  us  by  "God"  and  nature.  In- 
deed, the  world  may  be  only  a  huge  farce,  the  work  of 
a  "  jovial  Demiurge." 7  Nevertheless,  let  us  remain  stead- 
fast in  virtue,  but  let  us  show  at  the  same  time  by  our 

1  Dialogues  phil.,  p.  xix  ;  see  also  Souvenirs,  343. 

2  See  Souvenirs,  57  S.  (Priere  sur  1'Acropole). 
8  Ibid.  *  Ibid.,  122. 

6  Dialogues  phil.,  p.  viii.  e  Dialogues  phil.,  43  f . 

7  Drame$  phil.,  359. 


KENAN  285 

gayety  and  ironical  detachment  that  we  do  not  take 
Nature  any  more  seriously  than  she  takes  us.  In  this 
way,  even  if  life  should  turn  out  to  have  no  meaning, 
we  shall  not  have  been  entirely  mistaken.1  Renan  de- 
clares in  his  "  Avenir  de  la  science  "  that  if  he  ever 
ceased  to  believe  in  science  he  would  "  either  commit 
suicide  or  turn  epicurean." 2  His  faith  in  science,  with- 
out disappearing,  had  been  shaken,  and  so,  with  his 
love  of  combining  opposites,  he  sets  out  to  be  at  one 
and  the  same  time  scientific  stoic  and  epicurean.  He 
had  long  recognized  that  the  morals  of  Epicurus  are 
alone  suited  to  the  masses.  Only  those  partake  of  the 
"  ideal  "  who  advance  the  cause  of  science,  —  a  privi- 
lege evidently  reserved  for  an  intellectual  elite.  To  the 
common  people  he  leaves  what  Wordwsorth  calls  "  the 
primary  felicities  of  love  and  wine."  He  is  opposed  to 
temperance  societies  that  would  deny  the  lower  classes 
such  legitimate  satisfactions  as  drunkenness.  He  only 
asks  that  this  drunkenness  "  be  gentle,  amiable,  accom- 
panied by  moral  sentiments  (!)."  3 

There  are  times  when  these  epicurean  consolations 
do  not  come  amiss  even  to  the  scientific  sage.  It  was 
in  some  such  mood  that  Renan  wrote  his  "Drames 
philosophiques."  In  reading  a  production  like  "  L'Ab- 
besse  de  Jouarre,"  in  which  the  most  chastened  lan- 
guage is  used  to  express  ideas  that  are  the  contrary 
of  chaste,  we  are  tempted  to  exclaim  :  Purissima  im- 
puritas  !  Many  of  these  faults  of  taste  would  doubtless 

1  The  foregoing  argument  is  condensed  from  Feuilles  de'tachees,  394  ff . 
8    Avenir  de  la  science,  411.  8  Feuilles  detachees,  384. 


286  MODEKN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

have  been  avoided  if  Renan  had  continued  to  receive 
the  counsel  and  guidance  of  his  sister  Henriette.  But 
it  was  largely  because  of  these  very  faults  that  he  be- 
came during  the  closing  years  of  his  life  one  of  the 
most  popular  men  in  France.  He  was  often  seen  in 
fashionable  drawing-rooms,  and  was  in  constant  demand 
for  public  addresses,  dinners,  and  receptions.  "  France," 
as  he  expresses  it,  "  likes  one  to  flatter  her  and  to  share 
her  faults." l 

v 

We  are  naturally  led  in  discussing  this  epicurean  side 
of  Renan  to  speak  also  of  the  "  dilettanteism  "  with  which 
his  name  is  so  often  associated.  Here  again  we  have 
only  to  follow  out  the  consequences  of  his  first  assump- 
tion that  knowledge  is  an  absolute  and  self-sufficient 
good  which  does  not  need  to  be  made  tributary  to  any- 
thing higher  than  itself.  Renan  sanctifies  his  intellect 
by  putting  it  into  the  service  of  science,  and  starts  out 
to  be  "  sacredly  curious  of  everything." 2  If  he  was  still 
in  many  ways  a  Catholic,  nothing  proves  more  conclu- 
sively that  he  had  ceased  to  be  a  Christian  than  this 
exaltation  of  curiosity  as  the  highest  power  of  our  na- 
ture.3 He  himself  says  that  "Jesus  and  his  disciples 
had  quite  neglected  that  part  of  the  human  spirit  which 
craves  for  knowledge."4  The  Christian  tendency  has 
been  to  run  into  the  opposite  extreme,  to  attach  an  en- 

1  Questions  contemporaines,  66;  see  also  Souvenirs,  352-53. 

2  Avenir  de  la  science,  157. 

8  "  La  science  restera  toujours  la  satisfaction  du  plus  haut  ddsir  de 
notre  nature,  la  cnriosite*,"  etc.  (Avenir  de  la  science,  p.  xix). 
4  L'Eglise  chretienne,  142. 


KENAN  287 

tirely  bad  sense  to  the  word  curiosity,1  and  to  see  in 
all  intellectual  activity  only  a  form  of  the  libido  stiendi, 
one  of  the  three  lusts  by  which  man  is  assailed.  We  are 
told  that  the  teachers  of  Port-Royal  dismissed  a  boy 
from  their  school  because  he  showed  too  great  an  intel- 
lectual eagerness.2  Bishop  Wilson,  expressing  the  mod- 
erate Christian  view,  remarks,  "  An  eager  desire  for 
knowledge  ought  to  be  governed  and  restrained,  being 
as  dangerous  and  sinful  as  any  other  inordinate  appe- 
tite, even  as  those  that  are  confessedly  sensual." 

Renan,  for  his  part,  can  imagine  no  limit  either  to  the 
pleasures  or  the  profits  of  curiosity.  Even  paradise,  he 
thinks,  must  be  tiresome  —  made  up  in  large  part,  as  it 
is  said  to  be,  of  pious  old  ladies  —  unless,  indeed,  it 
should  be  enlivened  by  trips  of  observation  from  planet 
to  planet.3  We  cannot  but  sympathize  with  him  when 
he  wonders  that  Amiel,  instead  of  giving  himself  up  to 
the  joys  of  scientific  curiosity,  should  prefer  to  write  a 
journal  intime  of  sixteen  thousand  manuscript  pages, 
filled  with  morbid  brooding  and  introspection.  "  My 
friend,  M.  Berthelot,  would  have  enough  to  keep  him 
busy  for  hundreds  of  consecutive  lives,  without  ever  writ- 
ing about  himself.  I  compute  that  I  should  need  five 
hundred  years  to  complete  my  Semitic  studies,  as  I  have 
planned  them,  and  if  my  interest  in  them  grew  less,  I 
should  learn  Chinese."4 

1  See  Pascal,  Pense'es,  art.  II,  6  :  "  Curiosite*  n'est  que  vanite*,"  etc.  Cf. 
also  Tertullian,  De  praescr.  hcer.,  C.  7:  "  Nobis  curiositate  opus  non  est 
post  Jesum  Christum,  nee  inquisitione  post  evangelium." 

2  See  Sainte-Benve,  Port-Royal,  m,  495. 

8  Feuilles  detachees,  p.  xvi.  4  Ibid.,  359. 


288  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Curiosity,  in  fact,  is  so  satisfying  that  even  if  the  serv- 
ices it  is  supposed  to  render  in  bringing  about  a  scien- 
tific millenium  should  prove  illusory,  it  would  still  be  a 
sufficient  reward  in  itself.  "  Whatever  system  we  adopt 
regarding  the  universe  and  human  life  it  cannot  be  de- 
nied that  they  appeal  keenly  to  our  curiosity.  .  .  .  We 
can  abuse  the  world  as  much  as  we  like,  we  shall  not 
keep  it  from  being  the  strangest  and  most  absorbing  of 
spectacles," 1  etc.  "  Philosophical  curiosity  thus  becomes 
the  noblest  and  surest  use  of  thought.  Even  though  all 
the  rest  were  vain,  it  seems  that  curiosity  would  not  be 
so ;  and  even  if  it,  too,  were  vanity,  it  would  in  any  case 
have  been  the  most  delightful  way  of  passing  one's 
existence."  2  We  have  in  such  utterances  the  germs  of 
dilettanteism.  If  we  go  back  to  the  original  Italian 
meaning,  the  dilettante  is  one  who  pursues  a  thing  with- 
out any  ulterior  end,  and  solely  for  his  own  delight 
(diletto).  In  this  particular  case,  the  "  delight "  is  in 
exercising  curiosity  for  its  own  sake,  in  taking  the  world 
purely  as  a  spectacle.  In  short,  the  dilettante  is  an  in- 
tellectual voluptuary,  one  who  uses  the  mind  as  a  means 
of  delicate  enjoyment.  The  intelligence,  released  from 
all  restraint,  rejoices  in  its  own  ubiquity,  and  passes 
rapidly  from  negative  to  affirmative,  proving  that  all 
points  of  view  are  plausible  and  that  none  is  certain. 
Dilettanteism,  as  Bourget  defines  it,  "  is  a  disposition  of 
mind  at  once  intelligent  and  voluptuous,  that  inclines 
us  towards  the  different  forms  of  life,  one  after  the  other, 

1  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  330. 
8  Ibid.,  330  f . 


KENAN  289 

and  leads  us  to  lend  ourselves  to  all  these  forms  without 
giving  ourselves  to  any."1 

We  must  not,  however,  fall  into  the  error  of  the  frivol- 
ous Parisian  public,  and  see  in  Renan  only  the  epicurean 
and  dilettante.  He  retained  to  the  end,  and  in  the  midst 
of  all  his  uncertainties,  much  of  his  first  faith  in  science. 
This  at  once  puts  a  wide  gap  between  him  and  most  of 
his  disciples.  He  still  looked  upon  the  scientist  and  phi- 
lologist as  privileged  persons,  whose  pursuits  surpass  in 
seriousness  all  others.  M.  Anatole  France,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  at  pains  to  make  us  feel  that  the  occupations 
of  his  aged  savant,  M.  Sylvestre  Bonnard,  do  not  differ 
in  real  seriousness  from  those  of  M.  Trepof,  the  collector 
of  match-boxes.  Renan  thinks  it  would  be  worth  while 
for  a  thousand  laborious  investigators  to  spend  their 
lives  in  following  out  the  local  forms  of  a  single  legend, 
that  of  the  Wandering  Jew,  for  example.2  But  one  who 
sees  in  literature  and  erudition  only  refined  forms  of 
pleasure  is  logical  in  putting  them  on  a  level  with  other 
kinds  of  self-indulgence.  "  Those  who  read  a  great  many 
books,"  says  M.  Anatole  France,  "are  like  eaters  of 
hashish.  .  .  .  Books  are  the  opium  of  the  West.  A  day 
will  come  when  we  shall  all  be  librarians,  and  that  will 
be  the  end.  .  .  .  Fifty  volumes  a  day  are  published  in 
Paris  alone  without  counting  newspapers.  It  is  a  mon- 
strous orgy.  We  are  going  to  come  out  of  it  mad.  The 
fate  of  man  is  to  fall  successively  into  contrary  excesses. 
In  the  Middle  Ages  ignorance  engendered  fear.  There 
were  mental  diseases  then  with  which  we  are  now  un- 

1  Essais  de psychologic  contemporaine,  59.      a  Avenir  de  la  science,  224. 


290  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

familiar.    At  present  we  are  hastening  by  study   to 
general  paralysis."1 

We  need  not  spend  much  time  on  these  disciples  of 
Kenan.  The  faith  in  science  had  diminished,  even  in  the 
master;  it  is  still  further  attenuated  in  the  followers. 
"  What  is  perfectly  plain,"  says  M.  Anatole  France,  "  is 
that  our  confidence  in  science,  which  used  to  be  so 
strong,  is  more  than  half  lost.  .  .  .  Even  M.  Ernest  Re- 
nan,  our  master,  who  believed  and  hoped  in  science  more 
than  any  one  else,  confesses  that  there  was  some  illu- 
sion in  thinking  that  modern  society  could  be  entirely 
founded  on  rationalism  and  experiment." 2  But  with  the 
loss  of  this  faith  in  scientific  progress,  the  last  safeguard 
against  skepticism  tends  to  disappear,  and  the  world 
resolves  itself  into  a  flux  of  meaningless  phenomena. 
For  M.  France  holds  with  Renan  that  philosophy,  apart 
from  phenomena,  is  only  one's  personal  dream  of  the 
infinite,  a  mere  romance  of  the  individual  sensibility. 
Man  is  thus  deprived  of  all  standard  of  certainty,  either 
within  or  without  himself.  He  is  doomed  to  a  hopeless 
subjectivity,  and  might  as  well  give  over  the  attempt  to 
get  beyond  the  prison  walls  of  his  own  personality.3 
Being  is  entirely  swallowed  up  in  becoming.  These  mod- 
ern adepts  of  the  "  flowing  "  philosophy  have  come  to 
resemble  the  ancient  sophist4  who  banished  from  his 
conversation  all  use  of  the  verb  to  be. 

"  There  is  no  rest,  no  calm,  no  pause, 
Nor  good  nor  ill,  nor  light  nor  shade, 

1  La  Vie  litterairc,  i,  pp.  viii-ix.        a  Ibid.,  iv,  43. 

8  Ibid.,  I,  p.  iv.  <  Lycophron,  a  disciple  of  Gorgias. 


RENAN  291 

Nor  essence  nor  eternal  laws : 
For  nothing  is,  but  all  is  made." 

The  intellect  and  sensibility,  no  longer  consecrated  to 
the  service  of  science  or  of  anything  else  higher  than 
themselves,  are  put  to  purely  epicurean  uses.  As  a  re- 
sult we  had  some  years  ago  M.  Maurice  Barres  and  the 
philosophers  of  the  "  me  "  (moiistes],  who  "  cultivated 
their  ego  ardently,"  and  converted  it  into  a  mosaic  of 
refined  sensations.1 

Renanism  has  thus  come  to  be  synonymous  with 
some  of  the  most  subtle  forms  of  intellectual  corruption 
the  world  has  yet  known.  But  it  would  be  quite  un- 
profitable to  dwell  any  longer  on  these  dangers  of  dilet- 
tanteism.  The  failings  of  Renan  are  the  very  last  to 
which  men  of  our  own  race  are  liable.  We  can  be 
counted  on  to  avoid  his  over-emphasis  on  thinking  as 
compared  with  doing.  The  natural  impulse  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon  is  rather  to  rush  into  action  without  any 
adequate  notion  of  what  he  is  acting  for,  and  then  con- 
gratulate himself  on  leading  the  strenuous  life.  The 
very  excess  of  Renan  may  serve  as  a  corrective  of  what 
is  correspondingly  deficient  in  ourselves.  Our  ordinary 
estimate  of  an  author  needs  to  be  thus  completed  by  the 
standards  of  that  ideal  cosmopolitanism  which  Goethe 
taught  and  illustrated  so  admirably  in  his  own  life.  For 
it  is  hardly  worth  while  to  spend  so  much  time  on  for- 
eign literatures  if  they  cannot  be  used  to  round  out 
what  is  narrow  and  counteract  what  is  inadequate  in 

1  For  the  more  recent  and  very  different  point  of  view  of  M.  Barres, 
see  p.  368. 


292  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

our  national  culture.  If  Renan  himself  was  in  such 
despair  at  the  falling-out  between  France  and  Germany, 
it  was  because  he  believed  that  French  thought  and 
German  thought  cannot  work  to  advantage  separately, 
that  one  is  needed  to  correct  the  other.1  The  intellect- 
ual sensitiveness  and  critical  finesse,  the  delight  in  the 
free  play  of  ideas,  and  the  large  hospitality  of  mind 
that  characterize  men  like  Renan  and  Sainte-Beuve,  are 
not  qualities  that  from  present  appearances  we  run  any 
risk  of  overdeveloping.  It  would  hardly  be  going  too 
far  to  say  of  Renan  and  Sainte-Beuve,  quite  apart  from 
the  question  of  their  absolute  rank,  that  they  are,  of 
all  French  writers  of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  ones 
likely  to  prove  of  most  value  to  English  and  American 
readers. 

VI 

There  is  one  more  way  in  which  Renan  may  become 
our  teacher.  Any  study  of  him  would  be  singularly  in- 
complete that  failed  to  do  justice  to  his  greatness  as  an 
artist.  He  owes  his  preeminent  place  in  recent  literature 
even  less,  perhaps,  to  his  importance  as  a  thinker  than 
to  the  perfection  of  his  literary  workmanship  —  to  a 
finish  of  form  that  is  rare  in  French  prose,  and  still 
rarer  in  English.  "  More  than  any  other  writer  of  the 
century,"  says  M.  Faguet,  "  he  has  charm,  the  inde- 
finable something  that  envelops  and  finally  takes  posses- 
sion of  us.  Certain  pages  of  the  *  Souvenirs  d'enfance ' 
—  for  example,  the  'Prayer  on  the  Acropolis' — are 
among  the  finest  that  have  been  written  in  French." 2 

1  See  La  Reforme  int.  et  mor.,  124. 

2  Histoire  de  la  literature  franfaise,  n,  401. 


RENAN  293 

The  high  quality  of  this  charm  is  attested  by  the  very 
fact  that  it  eludes  all  analysis.  The  highest  art  should 
be  thus  free  from  any  trick  or  mannerism  that  can  be 
caught  or  imitated.  As  Joubert  remarks :  "  We  do  not 
like  in  the  arts  to  see  whence  our  impressions  arise. 
The  Naiad  should  hide  her  urn ;  the  Nile  should  conceal 
his  sources." 

In  short,  Renan  has  accomplished  the  rare  feat  of 
having  a  style  without  being  a  stylist.  He  tells  us  that 
he  was  "always  the  least  literary  of  men."1  This  utter- 
ance has  in  it  something  of  the  unjust  disdain  of  the 
philologist  for  the  man  of  imagination,  but  it  is  intended 
even  more  as  a  protest  against  the  too  deliberate  strain- 
ing after  literary  effect  that  Renan  found  in  so  many  of 
his  contemporaries.  He  cannot  conceal  his  impatience 
at  those  who  are  men  of  letters  before  being  men,  at 
the  aesthete  who  busies  himself  with  the  means  of  ex- 
pression before  making  sure  that  he  has  anything  to 
express.  When  asked  by  a  reporter  of  the  "  Figaro  "  for 
his  opinion  of  the  Symbolists  and  other  literary  schools 
that  were  making  such  a  stir  at  Paris  a  few  years  ago, 
he  replied  :  Ce  sont  des  enfants  qui  se  sucent  lepouce? 

Renan,  in  fact,  was  inclined  to  see  in  this  too  con- 
sciously literary  attitude  towards  life,  the  great  malady 
of  his  time:  "  Morbus  litter  arms  I  The  distinctive 
feature  of  this  disease  is  that  we  love  things  not  so 
much  for  themselves  as  for  the  literary  effect  they  pro- 
duce. We  come  to  see  the  world  through  a  sort  of 

1  Souvenirs,  354. 

3  Huret,  Enquete  sur  devolution  litteraire,  422. 


294  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

theatrical  illusion.  .  .  .  The  glare  of  the  footlights 
spoils  us  for  the  light  of  day."  1  Literature  seemed  to 
him  to  have  been  invaded  by  that  instinct  for  posing 
and  stage  effect  to  which,  in  its  lower  forms,  the  French 
give  the  name  of  cabotinage.  It  would  not  be  easy  to 
exaggerate  this  element  in  French  character,  especially 
since  Rousseau  and  the  romanticists.  Natio  comceda 
est.  Some  one  said  of  Chateaubriand  that  he  would  like 
to  occupy  a  hermit's  cell  —  on  a  stage.  Of  late  things 
in  France  have  come  to  such  a  pass  that  duels  are 
fought  in  the  presence  of  press  representatives  and 
amateur  photographers.  The  strange  maladies  that 
Kenan  saw  flourishing  around  him  under  the  name  of 
art  and  literature  furnished  him  many  hints  for  the 
picture  he  has  drawn  in  his  "Antechrist"  of  Nero  — 
the  imperial  cabotin  —  and  Roman  society  of  the  deca- 
dence. Nero,  he  tells  us,  was  a  "  conscientious  romanti- 
cist," the  first  to  discover  that  art  and  literature  are  the 
only  things  in  life  to  be  taken  seriously,  and  therefore 
an  authentic  ancestor  of  the  school  of  V art  pour  Vart. 
Renan,  in  his  anxiety  to  avoid  these  errors  of  aestheti- 
cism,2  was  even  ready  to  proscribe  all  systematic  teaching 
of  rhetoric  and  composition  as  tending  to  instil  into  the 
young  the  dangerous  heresy  that  expression  has  a  value 
independent  of  what  is  expressed.3  He  early  discovered, 

1  Feuittes  detachees,  232. 

2  We  should  recollect  that  Kenan  avoids  these  errors  in  the  form  and 
not  in  the  substance  of  his  writings.  Reference  has  already  been  made  to 
his  moral  sestheticism.  Cf.  also  passages  like  Souvenirs,  115,  where  he 
asserts  that  beauty  is  to  be  preferred  to  virtue. 

3  Souvenirs,  253  f. ;  see  also  220. 


RENAN  295 

he  says,  that  "romanticism  of  form  is  an  error,"1  and  so 
he  remained  faithful  to  the  classic  tradition  of  French 
prose,  to  that  ancient  school  of  literary  good  breeding 
which  saw  in  a  quiet  and  unobtrusive  style  a  virtue  akin 
to  quietness  and  unobtrusivenessof  dress.  There  is  a  strict 
analogy  between  the  legendary  red  waistcoat  of  Theo- 
phile  Gautier  and  Gautier's  style.  Renan  was  so  apprehen- 
sive of  falling  into  these  excesses  of  the  picturesque  that 
he  spent  a  whole  year,  as  he  informs  us,  in  "  toning  down  " 
the  style  of  the  "  Vie  de  Jesus." 2  This  respect  for  the 
traditional  standards  of  French  prose  in  the  very  midst 
of  the  romantic  revolt,  he  owed  in  part  to  his  own  native 
good  taste,  and  still  more,  perhaps,  to  the  influence  of 
his  sister  Henriette.  "She  it  was  who  convinced  me 
that  it  is  possible  to  say  everything  in  the  simple  and 
correct  style  of  the  classic  authors  and  that  new  expres- 
sions and  violent  images  always  come  either  from  pre- 
tentiousness or  ignorance  of  our  real  riches." 3  "  Ah!  do 
not  say,"  he  adds  elsewhere,  "that  they  achieved  no- 
thing, those  obscure  wits  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
whose  lives  were  spent  in  passing  judgment  upon  words 
and  weighing  syllables.  They  achieved  a  masterpiece 
—  the  French  language.  They  rendered  an  inappreciable 
service  to  the  human  spirit  by  creating  the  Dictionary, 
by  preserving  us  from  that  undefined  liberty  which  is 
fatal  to  languages.  ...  A  man  has  really  attained  to 
his  full  maturity  of  mind  only  when  he  has  come  to  see 

1  Souvenirs,  89.  2  Ibid.,  355. 

8  Ma  Sceur  Henriette,  35  f.  Other  persons  who  exercised  a  happy  influ- 
ence on  Kenan's  style  were  Augustin  Thierry  (see  Souvenirs,  371),  and  M. 
de  Sacy  of  the  Journal  des  Debate  (see  Fevilles  detachees,  135). 


296  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

that  the  Dictionary  of  the  Academy  contains  all  that  is 
needed  for  the  expression  of  every  thought,  however 
delicate  or  novel  or  refined  it  may  be."  l  To  grasp  the 
full  significance  of  the  conservative,  and  even  timid, 
attitude  that  Renan  here  assumes  towards  his  native 
tongue,  we  have  only  to  contrast  it  with  the  attitude 
of  a  literary  sans-culotte  like  Victor  Hugo,  who  boasts 
that  he  has  dealt  like  a  Robespierre  with  the  French 
vocabulary  and  "put  a  red  liberty  cap  on  the  old  Dic- 
tionary." 

In  spite  of  the  precept  and  example  of  Hugo  and 
most  of  the  men  of  letters  of  his  time,  Renan  persisted 
to  the  end  in  thinking  that  sobriety  and  restraint  and 
regard  for  traditional  good  taste  are  literary  virtues. 
As  a  result,  his  style  is  so  uniformly  perfect  that  it 
rarely  if  ever  falls  short,  save  in  so  far  as  it  images  the 
shortcomings  of  his  character  and  philosophy.  The 
masculine  elements  do  not  predominate  in  his  character, 
and  his  style  is  therefore  without  the  virile  ring  that 
we  find  in  the  prose  of  a  Pascal.  There  is  not  enough 
in  his  philosophy  to  exalt  him  above  himself,  so  that  his 
pages  do  not  often  have  the  communicative  warmth 
that  can  come  only  from  a  vital  conviction.  If,  instead 
of  trying  his  work  by  these  severe  standards,  we  com- 
pare it  with  other  recent  achievement  in  France  or 
elsewhere,  we  can  hardly  fail  to  recognize  its  rare  dis- 
tinction. Our  total  judgment  of  Renan  may  be  summed 
up  by  saying  that,  though  he  is  a  great  intelligence,  he 
has  few  of  the  qualities  of  a  great  philosopher,  but 

1  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  341  f . 


KENAN  297 

many  of  the  qualities  of  a  great  historian,  and  nearly 
all  the  qualities  of  a  great  artist.  He  is  a  consummate 
master  of  prose  style  in  a  language  that  easily  surpasses 
in  the  general  excellence  of  its  prose  all  other  modern 
literatures. 


X 

BRUNETIERE 

FEW  men  have  ever  crowded  more  intense  activity 
into  a  life  of  fifty-seven  years  than  Brunetiere  and  there 
are  few  more  striking  examples  of  what  may  be  achieved 
by  a  frail  physique  when  sustained  by  an  indomitable 
will.  After  having  in  his  youth  been  refused  admission 
as  a  student  to  the  Ecole  Normale,  he  finally  entered 
as  a  teacher  into  that  inner  citadel  of  French  higher 
education.  He  became  member  of  the  Academy  in  1893, 
and  almost  at  the  same  time,  after  long  service  in  a  sub- 
altern post,  editor-in-chief  of  the  "  Revue  des  Deux 
Mondes."  His  trip  to  America  early  in  1897  was  only 
one  of  his  many  appearances  as  orator  and  lecturer. 
He  published  on  an  average  at  least  a  volume  a  year 
during  the  thirty  years  or  more  of  his  activity  as  a 
critic,  yet  died  before  finishing  the  History  of  French 
Classicism  which  promised  to  be  his  monument :  Pendent 
opera  interrupta.  The  completed  portions  of  this  work 
are  suggestive  of  a  greater  mellowness,  or  at  least  of 
some  toning-down  of  the  logical  asperity  of  his  style. 
The  study  of  Montaigne,  which  is  one  of  the  last  things 
he  did,  is  also  one  of  the  best,  a  remarkable  achieve- 
ment for  a  man  in  the  final  stages  of  a  wasting  disease. 
Montaigne,  a  notable  embodiment  of  the  esprit  de 
finesse,  has  rarely  if  ever  been  better  judged  than  by 


BRUNETI^RE  299 

Brunetiere,  an  embodiment  of  the  esprit  de  geometric  ; 
for  one  can  scarcely  admit,  as  M.  de  Vogue  contends  in 
his  commemorative  article  in  the  "  Revue  des  Deux 
Mondes,"  that  there  was  a  perfect  balance  in  Bruneti&re's 
mind  between  the  two  elements  defined  by  Pascal.  His 
real  kinship  in  the  sixteenth  century  is  not  with  Mon- 
taigne, but  with  that  master  logician,  John  Calvin. 
There  is  the  same  lack  of  delicacy,  amenity,  charm ;  but 
one  should  add  of  Brunetiere' s  style,  as  he  himself  says 
of  Calvin's,  that  "  its  severity  has  after  all  its  own  no- 
bility, and  its  very  angularity  and  tension  its  own 
special  majesty." 1 

i 

Calvin  is  the  first  eminent  example  of  the  esprit  de 
geometrie  in  French  prose,  but  the  same  turn  for  dia- 
lectic is  visible  in  the  earlier  scholastics  who  wrote  in 
Latin.  Like  Taine,  Brunetiere  makes  us  feel  how  much 
scholasticism  still  lingers  in  the  land  of  its  origin. 
Though  both  tried  to  apply  the  methods  of  inductive 
science,  they  remained  scholastic  in  their  passion  for 
vast  structures  of  general  ideas  conceived  with  geo- 
metric symmetry  and  with  reference  less  to  the  observed 
facts  than  to  a  logical  requirement  of  the  mind ;  they 
are  scholastic  by  their  use,  as  well  as  by  their  abuse,  of 
dialectic,  by  their  proneness  to  mistake  ratiocination 
for  reason.  This  passion  for  logical  consistency  has 
been  from  the  start  the  chief  merit  of  the  French  mind, 
or,  when  indulged  in  at  the  expense  of  the  facts  and 
common  sense,  its  most  serious  failing.  The  French 

1  Hist,  de  la  lU.fr.  classique,  I'  Partie,  218. 


300  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

readiness  on  occasion  to  oppose  ratiocination  to  plain 
evidence  reminds  one  of  M.  Jourdain  and  the  skill  in 
fence  that  enabled  him  to  kill  a  man  par  raison  demon- 
strative. Perhaps  the  most  irritating  example  in  the 
case  of  Brunetiere  is  the  attitude  he  assumed  during 
the  Dreyfus  affair.  Yet  in  a  general  way  Brunetiere's 
logic  shows  more  respect  for  the  facts  than  Taine's. 
Facts  that  enter  Taine's  mind  are  like  rays  of  light 
passing  through  a  bit  of  Iceland  spar,  —  they  are  re- 
fracted and  polarized  along  the  lines  of  his  theory. 
There  is  less  real  science  in  Brunetiere  than  in  Taine 
and  also  less  pseudo-science,  or  at  least  the  pseudo- 
science  is  less  intimately  interwoven  with  his  treatment 
of  literature ;  it  does  not,  like  Taine's  determinism,  im- 
pose upon  him  a  method  that  is  not  only  unliterary  but 
positively  anti-literary.  In  spite  of  his  attempt  at  lit- 
erary Darwinism,  to  be  noted  later,  Brunetiere  is  not  a 
scientist,  but  a  logician  with  a  brilliant  oratorical  gift 
and  a  keen  sense  of  historical  development. 

The  sense  of  historical  development  is  the  main 
point  of  contact  between  Brunetiere  and  Sainte-Beuve, 
and  this  point  of  contact  only  emphasizes  their  differ- 
ences. Sainte-Beuve,  who  was  supremely  endowed,  as 
I  have  said,  with  the  esprit  de  finesse,  had  almost  as 
great  a  passion  for  the  particular  as  Brunetiere  had  for 
the  general.  He  aims,  as  he  puts  it,  to  particularize 
everything,  and  when  he  generalizes  it  would  seem  that 
he  does  so  only  under  protest.  No  man  was  ever  more 
on  his  guard  against  the  deceit  that  lurks  in  universals, 
Yet  if,  in  Emerson's  phrase,  "  nature  resents  general- 


BRUNETI&RE  301 

izing,"  what  is  highest  in  human  nature  resents  the  lack 
of  it.  We  are  justified  in  demanding  a  compromise 
between  the  multiplicity  of  the  facts  and  the  craving 
for  unity.  The  epigraph  of  Brunetiere's  "Evolution 
de  la  poesie  lyrique"  was  evidently  directed  against 
the  method  of  Sainte-Beuve :  "  Whenever  we  are  trying 
to  get  at  the  meaning  of  a  complex  phenomenon,  it  is 
useless  if  not  dangerous  to  go  too  minutely  into  details." 
The  volume  on  Balzac  written  by  Brunetiere  shortly  be- 
fore his  death  is  almost  bare  of  details  about  Balzac's 
life ;  this  too  is  a  protest  against  the  tendency  of  the 
modern  school  to  substitute  biographical  small-talk  for 
the  serious  business  of  criticism. 

Brunetiere  is  admirable  as  an  historian  of  ideas  when 
his  logic  is  tempered  by  a  sufficient  knowledge  of  the 
facts,  as  is  the  case  for  nearly  the  whole  of  French 
literature  from  the  latter  part  of  the  sixteenth  century l 
to  the  present  day.  Throughout  this  whole  field  his  eru- 
dition is  immense  and  is  aided  by  a  marvellous  memory. 
He  is  at  his  best  in  tracing  main  currents  of  ideas  —  in 
such  articles,  for  example,  as  the  one  on  the  "  Forma- 
tion of  the  Idea  of  Progress."  This  is  a  kind  of  writ- 
ing which  is  thoroughly  worth  while  in  itself,  and  of 
which  we  have  only  too  little  in  English.  Brunetiere, 
however,  knew  virtually  nothing  at  first  hand  about 
Greek,  very  little  about  the  Middle  Ages,  and  not 
enough  of  other  modern  literatures  besides  French.  He 

1  For  Brunetiere's  imperfect  knowledge  of  the  early  sixteenth  century 
in  France,  especially  in  its  relations  to  Italy,  see  article  by  M.  Henri 
Hauvette,  in  Revue  critique  (8  juillet,  1905, 14  ff). 


302  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

is  capable  of  saying  that  Lessing1  wished  to  rid  Ger- 
many of  Greek  and  Latin,  that  Burns  and  Shelley'2' 
were  at  the  opposite  extreme  of  the  social  scale  from 
Byron,  and  that  Plato  "  argues  like  a  sophist  and 
thinks  like  a  child."3  We  may  suspect  that  a  man  who 
pronounces  such  a  judgment  on  Plato  is  not  a  trust- 
worthy witness  to  some  of  the  higher  things  of  the 
imagination.  For  the  critic  who  is  himself  unimagina- 
tive lacks  the  "  fit  key,"  as  Chapman  expresses  it,  "  with 
poesy  to  open  poesy."  Brunetiere  lived  for  neither  the 
senses  nor  the  imagination,  but  solely  for  ideas.  One 
might  say  of  him,  reversing  Gautier's  familiar  remark, 
that  he  was  a  man  for  whom  the  visible  world  did  not 
exist.  "  He  was  possibly,"  says  M.  de  Vogue,  "  the 
only  great  man  of  letters  of  the  nineteenth  century  for 
whom  Rousseau  had  never  lived,  nor  Rousseau's  eldest 
son,  Chateaubriand,  and  who  did  not  have  in  his  blood 
a  single  drop  of  their  delicious  poisons."  We  may  ad- 
mit the  truth  of  this  assertion,  if  not  for  Brunetiere's 
temperament,  at  least  for  his  style.  He  is  in  curious 
contrast  in  this  respect  to  Taine,  who  had  according  to 
M.  Lemaitre,  a  "  violent  and  carnal  imagination,"  and 
who  at  any  rate  indulges  in  almost  a  superabundance 
of  picturesque  details. 

If  Taine  mixes  his  logic  with  local  color,  Brunetiere's 
logic  is  militant  and  oratorical.  The  title  of  some  of  his 
last  volumes,  "  Discours  de  Combat,"  would  be  equally 
appropriate  for  his  collected  works.  He  is  fond  of  say- 
ing of  the  great  French  writers  of  the  seventeenth 

1  Etudes  critiques,  vi,  225.      a  Ibid.,  234.      «  Discours  de  combat,  90. 


BRUNETIERE  303 

century  that  they  had  a  "  spoken  style  "  —  that  they 
did  not  "  see  themselves  write,"  but  "  heard  themselves 
talk."  This  remark  holds  good  of  his  own  style,  which 
always  has  the  movement  of  the  spoken  word  without 
having  anything  of  the  ease  of  conversation.  The  argu- 
ments are  clamped  and  mortised  together  by  logical 
connectives,  and  pushed  forward  in  menacing  array,  in 
a  manner  that  suggests  the  advance  of  Roman  legion- 
aries with  interlocked  shields.  He  has  been  called  the 
inventor  of  militant  criticism.  He  reminds  one  of  the 
old  saying  about  the  father  of  logic  :  Quaerit  Aris- 
toteles  pugnam.  "  A  man  would  not  feel  himself  alive," 
Brunetiere  remarks  in  the  course  of  a  plea  for  Christ- 
tianity  (!),  "  if  he  did  not  have  adversaries."  *  In  default 
of  a  real  adversary  he  frequently  addresses  himself  to 
an  imaginary  one.  His  rude  and  imperious  temper  has 
been  likened  to  the  testiness  of  the  neo-classical  Aris- 
tarch,  a  Boileau  or  a  Dr.  Johnson.  But,  unlike  Brunetiere, 
these  men  had  an  underlying  geniality  that  saved  them, 
even  when  most  severe,  from  seeming  atrabilious. 

Sainte-Beuve,  as  we  have  seen,  said  of  modern  critics 
that  they  abounded  in  all  the  critical  virtues  except  the 
essential  virtues  of  authority  and  judgment ;  that  what 
they  had  gained  in  brilliancy  and  versatility  they  often 
seemed  to  have  lost  in  weight  and  impressiveness.  It  is 
the  distinction  of  Brunetiere  to  have  avoided  the  re- 
proach of  Sainte-Beuve  and  to  have  given  back  to  the 
word  "critic"  something  of  its  former  meaning.  He  had 
convictions  and  insisted  on  judging  with  reference  to 

1  Discours  de  combat^  2*  B&ie,  166. 


304  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

them  at  a  time  when  convictions,  at  least  among  the 
educated  classes,  had  almost  completely  gone  out  of 
fashion.  He  possessed  something  of  the  power  that 
usually  belongs  to  those  who  have  convictions  to  im- 
pose themselves  on  those  who  have  none.  He  persisted 
in  the  somewhat  antiquated  notion  that  books  exist 
primarily  to  express  ideas,  whereas  most  people  now- 
adays turn  to  books,  not  for  ideas,  but  for  entertain- 
ment or  at  best  for  elegant  aesthetic  sensation.  He 
made  himself  the  champion  of  the  classical  tradition 
and  proclaimed  the  supremacy  of  reason  at  an  epoch 
when  art  was  given  over  to  every  form  of  morbid  sub- 
jectivity. He  was  stern  and  ascetic  in  a  period  of  easy- 
going self-indulgence.  He  produced  work  marked  by 
eminently  masculine  qualities  at  a  time  when  literature 
had  fallen  to  a  great  extent  under  the  influence  of 
women.  He  restricted  his  style  so  far  as  possible  to  the 
syntax  and  vocabulary  of  Bossuet  in  an  age  that  saw  the 
publication  of  the  sonnets  of  Mallarme  and  the  Journal 
of  the  Goncourts. 

Renan  urges  us  not  to  get  ruffled,  but  "  to  suffer  the 
destinies  of  the  planet  to  be  fulfilled ;  our  outcries  will 
be  of  no  use,  our  ill-humor  would  be  quite  out  of  place."  * 
This  comfortable  philosophy  is  the  exact  opposite  of 
Brunetiere's.  He  liked  to  quote  Comte's  saying  that  hu- 
manity is  composed  of  more  dead  than  living.  He  so 
championed  the  opinions  of  this  dead  majority  as  to 
come  into  conflict  with  nearly  all  the  main  tendencies 
of  his  own  age.  A  modern  Siger  of  Brabant,  he  took  it 

1  Souvenirs,  p.  xx. 


305 

upon  himself  to  syllogize  truths  unpalatable  to  most 
of  his  countrymen.  He  defended  the  general  sense 
of  mankind  in  such  a  way  as  to  isolate  himself  from 
his  contemporaries.  "  It  is  a  sort  of  joy,"  he  remarks, 
"  for  a  man  to  stand  apart  in  the  midst  of  an  indiffer- 
ent or  hostile  society,  living  in  it  and  belonging  to  it, 
but  judging  it."  Of  this  austere  joy  Brunetiere  must 
have  had  his  fill,  especially  if,  as  his  friends  claim, 
he  was  very  far  from  being  steeled  to  the  inevitable 
reprisals.  Possibly  his  sympathy  for  Alfred  de  Vigny 
was  due,  not  only  to  a  common  pessimism,  but  to  the 
fact  that,  like  Vigny,  he  concealed  a  great  sensitiveness 
under  outer  coldness  and  reserve.  A  stoic,  born  into  a 
somewhat  neurasthenic  age,  Brunetiere  looked  on  it  as 
his  special  mission  to  attack  every  form  of  epicurean 
relaxation.  There  was,  then,  an  almost  necessary  con- 
flict between  him,  the  least  Gallic  of  Frenchmen,  and 
contemporaries  whom  he  describes  as  "epicureans  of 
the  decadence  "  ;  between  himself  and  M.  France,  whom 
he  deemed  to  be  no  better  than  a  literary  voluptuary ; 
between  himself  and  Renan,  who  seemed  to  him  bent 
on  turning  the  intellect  itself  into  a  means  of  refined 
enjoyment. 

The  history  of  Brunetiere's  work  as  a  critic  is,  to  a 
great  extent,  the  history  of  his  polemics.  Three  of 
these  polemics  in  particular  deserve  attention.  At  the 
very  beginning  of  his  career  as  a  writer  in  the  "  Revue 
des  Deux  Mondes  "  he  singled  out  Zola  and  the  natural- 
ists for  his  attacks,  and  continued  these  attacks  in  a 
running  fire  of  articles  extending  over  a  period  of 


306  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

twelve  years.  Later  on,  he  proclaimed  that  modern  sci- 
ence was  bankrupt,1  that  it  had  failed  to  keep  its  prom- 
ises, and  he  thus  became  involved  in  a  war  of  pamphlets 
with  Berthelot  and  other  advocates  of  purely  experi- 
mental methods.  And  finally,  for  a  number  of  years  he 
never  lost  an  opportunity  to  assail  M.  Jules  Lemaitre 
and  M.  Anatole  France  and  the  partisans  of  impression- 
istic criticism. 

ii 

The  volume  in  which  Brunetiere  collected  the  earlier 
articles  of  his  first  critical  campaign  ("  Le  Roman  na- 
turaliste,"  1883)  was  the  first  weighty  protest  against 
the  naturalistic  doctrine  that  had  held  unquestioned 
sway  since  "  Madame  Bovary "  and  Taine's  essay  on 
Balzac.  He  took  special  pains  to  demolish  the  scientific 
pretensions  of  Zola  and  his  followers,  especially  the  cult 
of  the  "  human  document."  The  collection  of  notes  and 
minute  observations  of  the  passing  show  of  life,  he  says, 
renewing  a  favorite  distinction  of  Goethe's,  can  at  most 
give  the  actual,  but  not  the  real,  which  it  is  the  aim  of 
art  to  render.  Applied  to  the  past  the  method  is  equally 
futile.  Edmond  de  Goncourt  had  not  succeeded  in  dis- 
engaging a  true  history  from  the  "thirty  thousand 
pamphlets  and  two  thousand  newspapers " 2  that  ac- 
cording to  his  own  statement  he  had  read  in  prepara- 
tion for  his  book  on  the  eighteenth  century.  Stripped 

1  The  phrase  "  faillite  de  la  science  "  occurs  in  the  article  in  the  Revue 
des  Deux  Mondes  (1  Janvier,  1895),  written  after  his  return  from  the 
Vatican.  M.  Berthelot  replied  in  the  Revue  de  Paris  (1  feVrier,  1895). 

2  Le  Roman  naturaliste,  296. 


f 


BRUNETIERE  307 

of  its  veneer  of  pseudo-science,  its  piling  up  of  notes  of 
life  literally  observed,  naturalism,  so  far  from  being  a 
reaction  against  romanticism,  is  in  many  respects  its  log- 
ical continuation.  The  temperament  of  Zola  reproduces 
on  a  lower  plane  the  temperament  of  Hugo ;  the  roman- 
tic dream  has  merely  changed  into  a  nightmare.  "  M.  Zola 
reconstructs  nature  and  adjusts  it  to  the  exigencies  of 
his  own  hallucinations,"1  says  Brunetiere.  He  substi- 
tutes audaciously  for  reality  "  the  obscene  or  grotesque 
visions  of  his  overheated  imagination."2  Brunetiere 
points  out  the  relationship  between  Flaubert  and  Cha- 
teaubriand. The  "impressionism"  of  the  Goncourts, 
which  he  defines  as  a  systematic  confusion  of  the  art 
of  painting  with  the  art  of  writing,3  is  also  plainly  of 
romantic  origin. 

Naturalism,  indeed,  is  already  in  germ  in  the  "  Con- 
fessions "  of  Rousseau ;  and  so  Brunetiere  was  consistent 
in  taking  a  distinctly  hostile  attitude  towards  the  whole 
literature  which  issued  from  Rousseau.  He  was  one  of  the 
first  to  point  out  what  he  called  the  essentially  "  lyrical" 
character  of  the  great  romantic  writers :  and  by  this  he 
meant  their  complete  self-absorption,  their  unwillingness 
to  occupy  themselves  with  anything  except  their  own 
emotions,  their  imperviousness  to  ideas.  At  the  distance 
of  nearly  a  century,  the  attempt  of  Chateaubriand  to 
stem  the  current  of  modern  thought,  and  to  react  in  the 
name  of  religion  towards  the  Middle  Ages,  is  seen  to 
have  resulted,  not  in  the  maintenance  of  a  Christian 
ideal  in  literature,  but  in  the  isolation  of  literature  from 

1  Le  Roman  naturaliste,  350.  3  Ibid.,  348.  8  Ibid.,  94. 


308  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

life.  It  had  been  the  ambition  of  Andre  Che'nier  to 
effect  a  reconciliation  between  the  artistic  imagination 
and  modern  science,  but  the  writers  who  followed  the 
lead  of  Chateaubriand  took  a  certain  pride  in  remaining 
ignorant  of  the  intellectual  and  scientific  aspirations  of 
their  age.  The  penalty  they  paid  was  an  increasing  in- 
capacity for  ideas.  Chateaubriand  himself  was  concerned 
more  with  the  images  and  the  musical  cadences  of  his 
periods  than  with  their  intellectual  content.  Resolutely 
silencing  in  himself  any  velleity  he  may  have  had  to 
think,  and  bidding  defiance  to  the  bourgeois,  Gautier 
gave  himself  up  exclusively  to  the  search  for  rare  and 
refined  aesthetic  sensation.  As  time  went  on  the  means 
employed  by  the  different  schools  to  arrive  at  a  titillation 
of  the  aesthetic  faculty  became  increasingly  complex  and 
incomprehensible  to  the  uninitiated.  "Literature,"  wrote 
M.  Lemaitre  at  the  height  of  the  symbolistic  movement, 
"  tends  more  and  more  to  become  a  mysterious  diversion 
of  mandarins." 

If  such  was  the  fate  of  a  literature  devoid  of  intel- 
lectual qualities,  science,  bereft  of  the  succor  of  the 
imagination,  fell  only  too  often  into  arid  analysis.  In 
spite  of  their  apparent  divergence,  however,  the  two 
classes,  the  aesthetes  and  the  analysts,  had  one  import- 
ant point  of  resemblance.  The  artist  pursued  his  aesthe- 
tic sensation  and  the  scientist  his  analysis  mechanically 
and  as  ends  in  themselves  without  reference  to  any  aim 
that  would  have  brought  them  into  contact  with  life 
as  a  whole.  They  wanted  respectively  art  for  art's  sake 
and  science  for  the  sake  of  science.  They  refused  equally 


BRUNETI&RE  309 

to  take  cognizance  of  that  region  of  their  own  nature 
which  is  independent  of  both  sensation  and  analysis, 
and  thus  cut  themselves  off  from  the  insight  which  alone 
makes  possible  a  belief  in  the  freedom  of  the  will.  In 
this  way  it  came  to  pass  that  Zola,  one  of  the  extreme 
representatives  of  a  literature  of  pure  sensation,  was 
able  to  agree  with  Taine,  an  extreme  scientific  intellect- 
ualist,  in  the  affirmation  that  virtue  and  vice  are  pro- 
ducts no  less  than  sugar  and  vitriol.  "  A  whole  subtle 
psychology  utterly  escapes  him,"  says  Brunetiere  of 
Zola,  "  the  psychology  of  the  forces  of  intellect  and  will 
which  carry  on  the  good  fight  against  the  shock  of  sen- 
sation and  resist  the  assaults  of  desire.  Do  not  speak 
to  him  of  a  liberty  which  is  in  some  sort  detached  from 
the  body,  dominating  it  and  imposing  on  it  higher  ends 
than  the  satisfaction  of  bodily  cravings ;  he  would  not 
understand  you."  l 

Brunetiere  thus  attacked  the  aesthetic  naturalists 
because  of  their  disregard  of  those  qualities  which  are 
most  truly  human,  because  of  their  attempt  to  reduce 
man  to  the  plane  of  animal  instinct.  In  defense  likewise 
of  the  human  self  and  of  the  discipline  it  imposes  he 
attacked  the  "  impudent  knowingness  "  of  the  scientific 
naturalists,  of  a  Berthelot,  for  example,  who  proclaimed 
that  the  answer  to  every  question  is  to  be  sought  in  the 
laboratory  and  that  there  are  "no  more  mysteries." 
Man,  Brunetiere  insists,  is  more  than  nature.  "  The 
great  error  of  the  century,  in  morality  as  well  as  in 
science  and  art,  has  been  to  mingle  and  confound  man 

1  Le  Roman  naturaliste,  207. 


310  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

with  nature  without  pausing  to  consider  that  in  art  as 
in  science  and  morality  he  is  a  man  only  in  so  far  as  he 
distinguishes  himself  from  nature  and  makes  himself  an 
exception  in  it."  *  One  of  the  most  pernicious  doctrines 
of  Rousseau  is  also  one  of  the  most  widely  spread  — 
that  of  the  natural  goodness  of  man.2  Man  becomes 
good  in  reality  not  by  obeying  but  by  resisting  "  na- 
ture." 

Brunetiere's  work,  then,  in  one  of  its  main  aspects 
may  be  defined  as  a  reaction  against  nineteenth-century 
naturalism  ;  a  protest  against  the  absorption  of  man  into 
nature.  "  There  is  surely,"  says  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
"  a  piece  of  divinity  in  us ;  something  that  was  before 
the  elements  and  owes  no  homage  unto  the  Sun." 
Brunetiere  differs  from  Sir  Thomas  Browne  in  that  he 
seems  to  have  arrived  at  the  notion  of  this  supersensuous 
self  more  by  logic  than  by  direct  vision.  His  idealism, 
resting  as  it  does  on  ratiocination  rather  than  on  in- 
sight, remains  essentially  negative,  and  so  failed  to  bring 
consolation. 

Brunetiere  was  fond  of  speaking  of  Christianity  and 
Buddhism  as  the  great  pessimistic  religions,  and  of 
identifying  their  doctrines  with  those  of  Schopenhauer. 
In  one  of  his  essays,  indeed,  he  seems  to  put  the  system 
of  Schopenhauer  above  Christianity  and  Buddhism.  He 
failed,  on  the  one  hand,  to  feel  the  essentially  negative 
character  of  the  philosophy  of  Schopenhauer ;  and  on 
the  other  hand,  to  appreciate  that  positive  principle  of 
joy  and  illumination  which  is  the  saving  element  of 

1  Nouvelles  questions  de  critique,  343.  2  Ibid.,  345,  370. 


BRUNETI^RE  311 

both  Christianity  and  Buddhism.  "  Let  us  live  happily, 
then,  though  we  call  nothing  our  own ;  for  so  shall  we 
be  like  to  the  bright  gods  feeding  on  happiness."  l  There 
is  something  in  the  ring  of  this  passage  which  will 
serve  once  for  all  to  mark  the  difference  between  the 
temper  of  Buddhism  and  the  acrid  disillusion  of  Scho- 
penhauer; and  what  is  true  of  Buddhism  is  at  least 
equally  true  of  Christianity. 

Hi 

Before  considering,  however,  more  fully  Brunetiere's 
relation  to  religion  let  us  take  up  his  third  and  most 
important  polemic  —  that  with  the  advocates  of  im- 
pressionistic criticism.  Here  again  he  championed  the 
ideal  as  he  understood  it.  He  maintained  against  M. 
Lemaitre  and  M.  France  that  in  addition  to  an  apparent 
self  of  sensations  and  impressions  there  exists  in  each 
man  a  real  self  that  he  possesses  in  common  with  other 
men.  He  threw  himself  with  special  ardor  into  a  con- 
flict that  seemed  to  him  to  be  pro  aris  et  focis  and 
to  involve  the  very  life  of  criticism.  The  cultivation  of 
literary  criticism  for  several  centuries  in  France  has 
had  the  somewhat  paradoxical  result  of  producing  critics 
who  deny  its  very  possibility.  "As  for  myself,"  says 
M.  France  in  the  preface  to  the  fourth  volume  of  his 
critical  studies,  "  I  am  not  in  the  least  a  critic.  I  have 
no  talent  for  working  the  threshing-machines  into 
which  ingenious  persons  put  the  literary  harvest  in 
order  to  separate  the  grain  from  the  chaff."  His  utmost 

1  Dhammapada. 


312  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

endeavor,  he  adds  elsewhere,  is  to  tell  pleasantly  of  the 
"  adventures  "  of  his  soul  in  the  midst  of  masterpieces.1 
M.  France,  it  may  be  noted  in  passing,  is  fond  of  talk- 
ing of  his  "  soul,"  when  he  means  in  reality  his  nerves 
and  sensibility.  M.  Lemaitre  and  M.  France  are  both 
desfeminins.  To  the  personality  of  M.  France  in  par- 
ticular there  attaches  something  of  that  elusive  charm 
which  makes  its  possessor  a  baffling  problem  to  others, 
and  very  often  to  himself.  The  debate  between  him 
and  Brunetiere  took  on  at  times  the  aspect  of  a  warfare 
between  the  masculine  and  feminine  principles.  Strength 
was  pitted  against  charm,  and  reason  arrayed  against 
sensibility. 

A  philosophical  point  of  view  always  reflects  in  some 
measure  the  temperament  of  its  propounder.  The  im- 
pressionists assert  that  it  can  reflect  nothing  else. 
Unfortunately  M.  Lemaitre  and  M.  France  justified  their 
assertion  too  much  by  their  practice  and  Brunetiere 
did  not  disprove  it  sufficiently  by  his.  In  the  case  of 
all  three  men  we  have  the  feeling  of  temperamental 
qualities  that  are  quarrelling  with  one  another  simply 
because  they  are  not,  as  Goethe  says  of  his  Tasso  and 
Antonio,  united  in  one  person.  But  even  such  a  union 
of  qualities  would  not  give  all  that  is  needful  for  the 
best  criticism.  There  would  still  be  lacking  the  type  of 
intuition  that  Joubert  possessed  more  completely  per- 
haps than  any  other  modern  French  critic. 

M.  Lemaitre  and  M.  France  have,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  worked  rather  far  apart  since  the  polemic  with 

1  La  Vie  litteraire,  I,  p.  iii. 


BRUNETIERE  313 

Brunetiere  in  the  early  nineties,  and  even  at  the  time 
they  were  perhaps  not  so  close  together  as  Brunetiere 
supposed.  They  both,  indeed,  have  a  greater  degree  of 
aesthetic  perceptiveness  than  Brunetiere,  of  that  gusto, 
as  we  may  say,  which  is  the  necessary  basis,  though  not 
the  whole,  of  taste.  M.  Lemaitre  is  not  only  superior  to 
Brunetiere  in  gusto,  but  at  the  time  of  his  polemic  with 
him  displayed  a  special  gusto  for  that  contemporary 
literature  from  which  Brunetiere  drew  back  with  almost 
ascetic  distrust.  M.  Lemaitre  says  that  such  is  his  love 
for  the  literature  of  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth 
century  —  "  so  intelligent,  so  restless,  so  mad,  so  mo- 
rose, so  morbid,  so  subtle  "  -  that  at  times  it  makes 
him  "quiver  with  delight  and  penetrates  him  with 
pleasure  to  his  very  marrow."  J 

In  his  literary  sensitiveness  M.  Lemaitre  reminds 
one  of  Sainte-Beuve  and  has  written  pages  that  Sainte- 
Beuve  would  probably  have  been  more  willing  to  sign 
than  those  of  any  other  recent  French  critic.  Anima- 
tion, sprightliness,  sparkling  wit,  and  at  the  same  time 
the  power  to  insinuate  deep  and  penetrating  reflection 
under  cover  of  an  airy  irresponsibility  —  these  and 
other  literary  virtues  abound  in  M.  Lemaitre.  Yet  the 
total  impression  that  disengages  itself  from  the  work  of 
what  one  may  term  his  first  period  is  a  sort  of  spiritual 
bewilderment.  He  evidently  finds  no  counterpoise  in 
himself  to  an  infinitely  mobile  intellect  and  sensibility. 
He  reminds  one  of  the  Jesuit  father  in  Pascal  who 
would  undertake  to  make  any  point  of  view  look  "prob- 

1  Contemporains,  i,  239. 


314  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

able."  "  It  is  delightful  to  see  this  learned  casuist  enter 
into  the  pros  and  cons  of  the  same  question  and  dis- 
cover good  reasons  everywhere  —  such  is  his  subtlety 
and  ingenuity."  M.  Lemaitre  is  ready  to  argue  a  ques- 
tion from  two,  four  or  six  points  of  view,  avoiding  the 
odd  number  as  savoring  too  much  of  a  conclusion. 

Yet  we  must  be  careful  not  to  exaggerate  the  spiritual 
bewilderment  and  lack  of  standards  of  M.  Lemaitre, 
even  when  he  was  most  impressionistic.  He  may  have 
quivered  responsive  in  his  inmost  fibres  to  the  appeal 
of  the  ultra-modern,  but  ultra-modern  writers  like  Zola 
and  Huysmans  and  Verlaine  had  no  special  reason  to  be 
elated  by  his  verdicts  on  them.  He  reacts  upon  writers 
of  this  kind  in  a  way  to  show  that  he  has  not  merely 
gusto  but  taste.  In  lieu  of  the  logic  that  so  superabounds 
in  Brunetiere  he  has  instinctive  good  sense,  which  is  an 
extremely  classical  virtue.  "  No,  I  shall  not  speak  of 
them,"  he  says  of  the  verses  of  the  symbolists,  "  because 
I  find  them  unintelligible  and  that  bores  me.  It  is  n't 
my  fault.  A  simple  native  of  Touraine,  child  of  a  sen- 
sible, moderate  and  mocking  race,  with  the  stamp  upon 
me  of  twenty  years  of  classic  habits,  I  am  ill  prepared 
to  understand  their  gospel."  l 

M.  Lemaitre,  in  short,  had  from  the  beginning  a  hold 
on  literary  tradition  that  balanced  the  keenness  of  his 
relish  for  contemporaries ;  and  though  he  lacked  inner 
standards  he  plainly  suffered  from  the  lack  and  did  not 
delight,  like  M.  France,  in  mere  mocking  detachment. 
The  attack  on  Kenan  that  first  attracted  attention  to 

1  Contemporains,  iv,  66. 


BRUNETI^RE  315 

M.  Lemaitre  as  a  critic,  though  it  doubtless  seemed 
somewhat  naive  to  him  later,  and  though  he  himself 
abounds  in  irony,  and  above  all  in  true  Gallic  malice  and 
irreverence,  is  yet  significant.  "  This  man,"  he  imagines 
a  somewhat  rhetorical  opponent  saying  of  Renan,  "passed 
through  the  most  terrible  moral  crisis  that  a  soul  can 
traverse.  He  was  forced  at  the  age  of  twenty,  and  under 
conditions  which  made  the  choice  especially  painful  and 
dramatic,  to  choose  between  faith  and  science,  .  .  .  and 
he  is  gay.  For  a  rent  that  was  more  superficial  (for  per- 
haps he  was  only  a  rhetorician)  Lamennais  died  in  final 
despair ;  for  a  great  deal  less  than  that  Jouffroy  remained 
incurably  sad.  For  still  less,  for  merely  having  feared 
that  he  might  doubt,  Pascal  went  mad,1  and  M.  Renan 
is  gay !  No,  no ;  M.  Renan  has  not  the  right  to  be  gay ; 
he  can  be  so  only  by  the  most  audacious  of  inconsist- 
encies. Even  as  Macbeth  murdered  sleep,  so  M.  Renan 
twenty  times,  a  hundred  times  over  in  every  one  of  his 
books,  has  murdered  joy,  has  murdered  action,  has 
murdered  spiritual  peace  and  the  tranquillity  of  the 
moral  life." 2  It  is  therefore  not  surprising  that  under 
the  stress  of  the  Dreyfus  affair  M.  Lemaitre  should,  in 
lieu  of  the  inner  standards  he  lacked,  have  fallen  back  on 
traditional  standards ;  in  other  words,  should  have  allied 
himself,  though  in  a  less  degree  than  Brunetiere,  with 
the  reactionaries.  Yet  the  gap  between  the  Lemaitre  of 
to-day  and  the  Lemaitre  whom  Brunetiere  attacked  as 
an  impressionist  is  not  so  wide  as  one  might  suppose. 

1  This  conception  of  Pascal  is  now  discredited. 
a  Contemporains,  l,  203. 


316  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ID  his  book  on  Racine  he  defends  the  classical  point  of 
view  with  a  sort  of  impressionistic  trepidation.  The 
result  is  piquant  and  in  some  respects  delectable.  In  the 
"Rousseau,"  we  have  an  impressionist  attacking  the 
father  of  impressionism,  and  this  too  is  not  without 
piquancy.  But  here  we  are  more  sensible  to  the  defects 
than  to  the  virtues  of  the  method,  especially  to  the  lack 
of  that  large  intellectual  structure  for  which  no  amount 
of  cleverness  in  single  pages  can  atone.  The  sense  of  a 
contraction  of  horizon  that  one  nearly  always  has  in 
French  reactionaries  is  reinforced  in  this  case  by  M. 
Lemaitre' s  insufficient  knowledge  of  Rousseau's  total  in- 
fluence abroad  as  well  as  in  France.  It  will  be  noted  also 
that  during  his  reactionary  period  M.  Lemaitre  has 
been  drawn,  whether  in  attack  or  defense,  to  writers,  who, 
like  himself,  have  a  highly  developed  if  not  predomin- 
ant sensibility,  —  Racine,  Fenelon,  Rousseau,  Chateau- 
briand. He  still  believes  that  the  critic  is  governed  by 
his  own  changing  sensibility  and  that  criticism  is  there- 
fore a  "  chimera." l 

IV 

M.  France  began  by  denying  the  possibility  of  fixed 
standards  far  more  radically  than  M.  Lemaitre  and  has 
persisted  in  his  denial.  One  finds  in  him  the  culmina- 
tion and  extreme  expression  of  a  main  form  of  the  crit- 
ical spirit  which  he  identifies  with  criticism  itself  —  the 
form  which,  as  he  says,  had  for  its  creators  Montaigne, 
Saint-Evremond  and  Bayle ;  the  last  in  date  of  all  the 
literary  forms  and  destined  perhaps  to  absorb  all  the 
1  Chateaubriand,  223. 


BRUNETIEKE  317 

others.  In  our  day  of  absolute  intellectual  liberty,  when 
curiosity  is  the  chief  virtue,  this  form  has  taken  the 
place  of  theology  and  has  found  its  Saint  Thomas 
Aquinas  in  Sainte-Beuve.1 

M.  France  as  a  matter  of  fact  has  simply  developed  to 
the  ultimate  stage  the  germs  of  relativity  in  his  masters 
Sainte-Beuve  and  Renan.  The  substitution  of  the  notion 
of  the  relative  for  the  notion  of  the  absolute — this, 
indeed,  seems  to  have  been  the  characteristic  achieve- 
ment of  the  nineteenth  century  not  only  in  literary 
criticism,  but  in  all  departments  of  thought.  From 
Hegel  to  Darwin,  the  idea  of  "  becoming,"  of  growth 
and  development,  has,  in  a  hundred  forms,  so  pene- 
trated and  transformed  the  mental  habits  of  the  modern 
man  as  to  make  it  increasingly  difficult  for  him  to  look 
upon  anything  as  fixed  and  final.  "  The  absolute  is 
dead ! "  exclaimed  Edmond  Scherer  in  1860.  But  the 
heart,  as  we  have  seen,  refused  to  ratify  this  verdict  of 
the  head.  Renan's  attempt  to  reconcile  in  himself  the 
old  man  with  the  new  resulted  in  his  theory  of  a  God 
who  does  not  yet  exist,  but  is  in  process  of  "  becom- 
ing." It  was  left  for  M.  Anatole  France  to  rid  himself 
of  these  weak  scruples,  and  to  arrive  at  what  may  be 
termed  the  doctrine  of  the  absolutely  relative.  The  affirm- 
ation of  M.  France  that  he  is  absolutely  imprisoned  in 
his  own  personality,  that  there  is  no  standard  to  which 
he  may  refer  either  his  own  opinions  or  those  of  others, 
has  as  its  corollary  a  doctrine  of  universal  illusion.  The 
immense  indulgence  he  professes  comes  in  part,  indeed, 
1  La  Vie  lit.t  i,  p.  v. 


318  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

from  his  power  of  sympathy,  but  even  more  from  a  tran- 
quil contempt  for  human  nature  thus  looked  upon  as  the 
mere  puppet  of  illusion.  Health  and  disease  are  vain  en- 
tities ; *  so  are  sanity  and  madness.2  The  new  sect  of 
"flowing  "  philosophers  to  which  M.  France  belongs  has 
arrived  at  a  conception  of  life  closely  corresponding  to 
that  of  the  "  flowing  "  philosophers  of  old :  — 

"  All  thoughts,  all  creeds,  all  dreams  are  true, 

All  visions  wild  and  strange  ; 
Man  is  the  measure  of  all  truth 

Unto  himself.  All  truth  is  change." 

The  Oriental  doctrine  of  illusion  has  thus  appeared 
in  Western  thought,  but  not  accompanied,  as  it  was  in 
the  mind  of  the  Hindu,  by  a  vision  of  the  One.  Leconte 
de  Lisle,  who  is  the  poet  of  this  modern  doctrine  of 
illusion,  excels  in  seizing  and  rendering  with  extraordin- 
ary intensity  the  most  fugitive  appearances  of  space 
and  time,  and  all  without  the  slightest  sentiment  of  a 
spiritual  reality  either  in  man  or  behind  the  shows  of 
nature.  There  has  passed  into  his  verse  something  of 
the  horror  and  vertigo  that  come  from  thus  contemplat- 
ing the  meaningless  flow  of  phenomena  as  they  start  up 
from  vacancy,  stand  out  for  a  moment  on  a  background 
of  deepest  black,  and  then  vanish  into  the  void :  — 

"  Eclair,  rgve  sinistre,  e'ternite'  qui  ment, 
La  Vie  antique  est  faite  ine'puisablement 
Du  tourbillon  sans  fin  des  apparences  vaines." 

The  sense  of  universal  illusion  does  not  result,  in  the 
case  of  M.  France,  so  much  in  metaphysical  anguish 
1  La  Vie  lit.,  u,  p.  viii,  8  Ibid.,  i,  183. 


BRUNETIERE  319 

as  in  an  extreme  form  of  the  romantic  irony  that 
abounds  in  the  later  work  of  Renan  —  the  irony  of  the 
man  who  hovers  over  all  points  of  view  and  refuses  to 
be  bound  by  any  because  every  point  of  view  is  neces- 
sarily relative  and  transitory.  M.  France,  however,  could 
cease  from  his  detachment  and  become  militant  enough 
when,  as  in  the  Dreyfus  affair,  the  liberties  of  the  ironist 
seemed  to  be  threatened  by  a  reversion  to  the  past 
and  its  intolerant  attempt  to  confine  the  spirit  within 
certain  definite  moulds.  But  even  here  his  irony  did 
not  spare  his  companions  in  the  cause  so  far  as  they 
themselves  had  any  definite  constructive  programme.  His 
underlying  mood  is  always  that  of  contemptuous  pity 
for  beings  who  even  in  their  most  serious  concerns  are 
the  dupes  of  mobile  appearances. 

' •'  Les  petites  marionnettes 

Font,  font,  font 
Trois  petits  tours, 
Et  puis  s'en  vont."  1 

But  the  little  marionettes,  as  M.  France  sees  them,  are 
thoroughly  vicious  and  depraved,  the  playthings  of 
hunger  and  the  reproductive  instinct.  At  bottom  his 
view  of  life  is  at  least  as  brutally  naturalistic  as  that  of 
Zola.  "  The  substance  of  human  nature,"  he  affirms, 
"  does  not  change,  and  this  substance  is  harsh,  egotisti- 
cal, jealous,  sensual,  ferocious."2  One  may  say,  in  his 
own  words  and  with  his  own  works  in  mind,  that  there 
is  something  strangely  acrid  in  contemporary  thought ; 
our  literature  no  longer  believes  in  the  goodness  of 
1  See  La  Vie  lit.,  i,  68.  2  Ibid.,  iv,  48. 


320  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

things.1  His  irony,  which  is  at  its  blandest  in  "  Le  Crime 
de  Sylvestre  Bonnard,"  becomes  in  later  works,  like 
"L'lle  des  Pingouins,"  positively  corrosive. 

It  was  therefore  not  inappropriate  that  M.  France 
should  have  pronounced  a  eulogy  over  Zola's  grave,  in 
spite  of  the  fact  that  a  few  years  before  he  had  spoken 
of  him  with  a  bitterness  in  strange  contrast  to  the  habit- 
ual appreciativeness  of  his  critical  writing.  "  His  work 
is  bad,"  he  had  said  of  Zola,  "  and  he  is  one  of  those 
wretches  of  whom  one  may  say  it  would  have  been  bet- 
ter if  they  had  never  been  born."  2  The  explanation 
of  the  contradiction  is  simple  enough :  if  M.  France 
does  not  differ  from  Zola  in  his  naturalistic  view  of  life 
(except  that  on  the  whole  he  is  less  optimistic),  he  does 
differ  from  him  infinitely  in  form  and  in  his  conception 
of  the  role  of  form.  Be  like  the  Greeks,  is  the  sum  of 
M.  France's  message ;  since  all  is  illusion  and  truth  es- 
capes us,  let  us  pursue  beauty3  (he  should  have  said, 
be  like  certain  Greeks,  especially  certain  Greek  sophists). 
About  the  only  inheritance  of  the  past  that  his  irony 
spares,  and  that  he  is  even  ready  to  defend,  is  the  an- 
cient classics  and  the  education  founded  upon  them. 
His  own  style  is  richly  reminiscent  of  the  past  and  in 
its  fusion  of  traditional  elements  has  been  compared  to 
Corinthian  metal.  It  has  all  the  Alexandrian  graces, 
however  much  it  may  fall  short  of  the  truly  classical 
vigor.  It  is  the  extreme  flower  of  the  Latin  genius,  says 
M.  Lemaitre.  We  may  add  that  it  is  also  the  extreme 
flower  of  romantic  aestheticism.  M.  France  puts  more 
i  La  Vie  lit.,  iv,  14.  «  Ibid.,  i  236.  3  Ibid.,  i,  343  £. 


BRUNETIERE  321 

emphasis  than  most  modern  aesthetes,  however,  on  the 
side  of  beauty  that  is  related  to  symmetry  as  compared 
with  the  side  that  is  related  to  expression.  He  is  more 
enamored  of  the  purity  of  the  line  both  in  art  and 
language  than  M.  Lemaitre,  for  example,  who  pursues 
the  vivid  and  the  expressive  even  at  the  risk  of  narrow- 
ing unduly  the  gap  between  the  written  and  the  spoken 
word.  He  is  not  only  more  intuitive  of  form  than  most 
of  his  contemporaries,  but  has  in  some  measure  that 
sense  of  the  human  that  has  been  so  conspicuously  ab- 
sent in  many  of  the  writers  and  critics  of  our  natural- 
istic period.  "  You  are  saddened,"  he  says  of  Hugo, 
"  and  at  the  same  time  frightened  not  to  encounter  in 
his  enormous  work,  in  the  midst  of  so  many  monsters, 
a  single  human  figure."  l 

M.  France  may  perhaps  best  be  defined  as  a  humanistic 
aesthete  — the  definition  I  have  already  applied  to  Walter 
Pater,  who  is  indeed  the  writer  with  whom  the  English 
or  American  reader  almost  inevitably  compares  him. 
Pater's  prose  has,  however,  less  purity  of  contour  than 
M.  France's,  nor  would  he  have  been  capable,  I  believe, 
of  reacting  so  humanistically  on  Hugo.  Though  quite 
as  aesthetic  in  his  point  of  view  as  M.  France,  Pater 
was,  to  do  him  justice,  less  profoundly  voluptuous.  I 
remember  having  seen  a  volume  of  M.  France  from 
which  a  distinguished  American  scholar,  who  valued 
him  greatly  on  his  humanistic  side,  had  nevertheless 
torn  out  a  whole  series  of  pages  —  the  same  treatment 
that  Joubert  accorded  so  liberally  to  his  library  of 

1  La  Vie  lit.,  i,  116. 


322  MODEKN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

eighteenth-century  authors.  The  contrast  is  also  less 
sharp  in  Pater  than  in  M.  France  between  a  sensibility 
that  is  steeped  in  romantic  religiosity  and  an  intellect 
that  is  increasingly  impious.  M.  France's  heart  revels  in 
Saint  Francis  at  the  same  time  that  his  head  demands 
Voltaire.  One  is  equally  conscious,  however,  in  Pater 
and  M.  France  of  an  epicurean  relaxation  that  is  com- 
bined in  both  writers  with  a  great  suavity.  In  both 
writers  we  feel  "  to  the  full,"  in  Pater's  own  phrase, 
"that  subtle  and  delicate  sweetness  which  belongs  to  a 
refined  and  comely  decadence."  Pater  has  been  a  doubt- 
ful influence  in  England.  As  to  M.  France's  influence, 
Greard  accused  him  to  his  face,  on  receiving  him  into 
the  Academy,  of  having  encouraged  les  songeries  mal- 
saines  et  les  dilettantismes  dissolvants. 

The  dangers  of  a  humanism  that  has  deserted  the 
character  and  will  and  taken  refuge  in  the  sensibility 
are  indeed  obvious.  Some  of  the  utterances1  of  M. 
France  fall  very  little  short  of  the  ultimate  stage  of 
aesthetic  deliquescence,  as  embodied  in  the  precious 
dictum  of  .the  anarchistic  Laurent  Tailhade,  "What 
matters  the  act  provided  the  gesture  be  beautiful  ? " 
One  feels  that  M.  France  would  not  balk  at  any  cor- 
ruption if  it  were  expressed  with  sufficient  artistry.  On 
the  other  hand,  he  is  almost  capable  of  a  certain  phari- 
saism  of  taste  in  dealing  with  the  vulgar  and  the  com- 
monplace. "  He  has  no  taste,"  he  says  of  Zola,  "  and 
that  I  have  finally  come  to  believe  is  the  mysterious  sin 
spoken  of  in  Holy  Writ,  the  greatest  of  sins,  the  only 

1  See,  for  example,  La  Vie  lit.,  n,  p.  iii. 


BRUNETI^RE  323 

one  that  will  not  be  pardoned."  l  Perhaps  the  best  ex- 
ample of  his  tendency  towards  a  pharisaism  of  taste  is  his 
onslaught  on  Georges  Ohnet.2  M.  Lemaitre  was  at  least 
as  effective  when  he  prefaced  his  article  on  the  same 
subject  by  the  remark  that  ordinarily  he  regaled  his 
readers  with  literary  subjects,  and  that  he  hoped  they 
would  pardon  him  if  to-day  he  spoke  to  them  of  the 
novels  of  M.  Georges  Ohnet. 

M.  France,  in  thus  giving  expression  to  an  occasional 
violent  antipathy,  differs  from  Pater,  who  virtually 
never  departs  from  the  note  of  appreciation.  But  in 
general  M.  France  would  reduce  his  role  as  a  critic  to 
an  expression  of  "  gentle  wonderment  at  the  beauty  of 
things."  He  is  a  dreamer,  as  he  tells  us,  and  interested 
in  things  less  for  themselves  than  for  what  they  can 
suggest  to  him.  "All  books,  even  the  most  admirable, 
appear  to  me  vastly  less  precious  for  what  they  contain 
than  for  what  thereader  puts  into  them." 3  The  wondrous 
dream  suggested  to  Pater  by  Mona  Lisa  and  her  smile 
is  perhaps  the  best  example  in  English  of  a  critic  nar- 
rating the  adventures  of  his  soul  in  the  presence  of  a 
masterpiece.  We  have  the  method  at  its  worst  in  the 
passage  of  M.  France  that  so  scandalized  Brunetiere  ; 
the  passage  in  which  he  sets  out  to  give  us  a  criticism  of 
Kenan's  "  History  of  the  People  of  Israel,"  and  indulges 
instead  in  a  revery  on  the  Noah's  ark  with  which  he 
played  as  a  child. 

The  whole  procedure  implies  a  certain  confusion  of 
the  genres,  an  unwillingness  to  discriminate  between 

1  La  Vie  lit.,  i,  233.        a  La  Vie  lit.,  n,  56  ff.        8  La  Vie  lit.,  n,  p.  M. 


324  MODERN  FKENCH  CRITICISM 

criticism  and  creation.  M.  Lemaitre,  though  he  has  also 
had  ambitions  as  a  creator,  keeps  far  more  distinct  the 
creative  and  critical  attitudes.  Possibly  M.  France  would 
have  done  more  with  criticism  if  he  had  felt  more 
keenly  its  separate  justification.  As  it  is,  in  his  total 
career  as  a  writer,  the  literary  criticism,  at  least  in 
the  narrower  sense  of  the  word,  is  little  more  than 
episodic. 

v 

Brunetiere  at  any  rate  gave  no  divided  allegiance  to 
criticism,  and  more  than  any  man  of  his  generation  cul- 
tivated it  as  a  clear-cut  type.  M.  France's  depreciation 
of  judgment  in  criticism  and  indeed  of  the  very  genre 
itself  arose,  as  I  have  tried  to  show,  from  his  extreme 
sense  of  relativity,  which  is  in  turn  a  product  of  nat- 
uralism. The  force  of  this  naturalistic  movement  is 
shown  by  the  fact  that  Brunetiere,  who  fought  it  in  so 
many  ways,  was  himself  anxious  to  enlist  in  its  service 
on  its  scientific  if  not  on  its  aesthetic  side.  He  battled 
for  the  integrity  of  the  type,  yet  granted  that  it  was 
involved  in  the  flux. 

Sainte-Beuve,  almost  alone  of  modern  critics,  suc- 
ceeded in  practising  criticism  both  as  a  science  and  as 
an  art ;  or,  as  he  himself  puts  it,  in  combining  poetry 
with  physiology.  Taine  attempted  to  make  of  criticism 
a  pure  science,  while  others,  like  M.  Lemaitre,  have  cul- 
tivated it  almost  entirely  as  an  art.  Brunetiere  also 
aimed  to  make  of  criticism  both  a  science  and  an  art, 
but  it  is  evident  at  a  first  glance  that  his  art  is  not  the 
art  of  Sainte-Beuve.  By  his  dogmatic  temper  he  seemed 


BRTJNETlfcRE  325 

fitted  to  keep  alive  the  tradition  which,  begun  in  Latin 
by  Scaliger,  was  continued  in  French  by  a  series  of 
critics  extending  from  Malherbe  and  Boileau  to  Nisard ; 
though  from  the  outset  he  was,  in  virtue  of  his  historic 
sense,  nearer  than  these  men  to  the  relativists.  In 
1889,  in  the  lectures  he  gave  at  the  Normal  School, 
he  announced  his  intention  of  becoming  scientific  as 
well  as  historical,  of  seeking  the  same  help  from  the 
doctrines  of  Haeckel  and  Darwin  that  Taine  had  sought 
from  the  doctrines  of  Cuvier  and  Geoffroy  Saint- 
Hilaire.  This  literary  Darwinism  of  Brunetiere  is  in 
general  an  attempt  to  demonstrate  that  the  different 
literary  genres  evolve  in  much  the  same  way  as  the 
animal  species.  He  proposes  to  show  "  in  virtue  of  what 
circumstances  of  time  and  place  they  originate ;  how 
they  grow  after  the  manner  of  living  beings,  adapting 
or  assimilating  all  that  helps  their  development ;  how 
they  perish  ;  and  how  their  disintegrated  elements  enter 
into  the  formation  of  a  new  genre."  l  For  instance,  the 
mediaeval  Chansons  de  Geste  ramified  into  prose  chron- 
icles and  Round  Table  romances  and  these  romances  in 
the  course  of  evolution  passed  over  into  the  modern 
novel. 

Brunetiere's  evolutionary  theory  is  defensible  when 
thus  stated  in  general  terms.  We  feel,  however,  that  in 
the  working-out  of  his  system,  scholasticism  has  often 
got  the  better  of  science,  and  that  he  has  been  led  astray 
by  his  love  of  logical  symmetry.  For  example,  Darwin 
attempted  to  account  for  the  origin  of  species  by  sup- 

1  L' 'Evolution  de  la  poesie  lyrique,  I,  6. 


326  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

posing  that  certain  animals  tend,  for  some  unexplained 
reason,  even  under  the  same  influences  of  environment, 
to  diverge  and  become  different  from  others  of  their 
kind.  In  the  same  Tray,  Brunetiere  tells  us,  individuals 
appear  from  time  to  time  who  have  the  power  to  modify 
the  course  of  literature  and  to  originate  new  literary 
genres.  He  thus  uses  a  doubtful  analogy  with  what  is 
itself  hypothetical  in  Darwin's  doctrine  to  explain 
the  one  supremely  important  event  in  art,  namely,  the 
rise  of  a  creator.  If  Brunetiere's  parallel  be  exact,  the 
individual  who  innovates  in  literature  does  so  in  obedi- 
ence to  a  blind  cosmic  impulse  rather  than  by  a  deli- 
berate act  of  his  own  will.  The  genres,  as  M.  Le- 
maitre  points  out,  become  in  his  hands  pure  scholastic 
entities,  vegetative  abstractions,  evolving  in  virtue  of  a 
life  of  their  own,  and  with  little  reference  to  the  authors 
through  whose  brains  they  pass.  The  valuable  germ  of 
truth  in  Brunetiere's  evolutionary  theory  is  already 
contained  in  a  simple  phrase  of  Aristotle's  "  Poetics  "  : 
"Tragedy  after  passing  through  various  transformations 
finally  attained  its  true  nature  and  there  it  stopped." 
The  danger  of  pushing  too  far  the  biological  analogy 
in  dealing  with  the  literary  genres  may  best  be  stated  in 
Brunetiere's  own  words:  "We  should  take  special  care 
not  to  transform  what  are,  after  all,  simple  metaphors  into 
sovereign  laws  of  criticism.  In  the  midst  of  these  am- 
bitious generalizations  the  sense  of  the  individual  is 
lost.  We  become  accustomed  to  value  the  men  and 
works  of  the  past  only  as  they  can  be  made  to  serve 
our  own  theories,  and  life  in  its  diversity  and  rich  com- 


BRUNETlfcRE  327 

plexity  escapes  us,  and  eludes  the  rigid  formulae  in 
which  we  seek  to  confine  it."  His  failure  to  carry  through 
his  evolutionary  programme  may  have  been  due  in  some 
measure  to  the  perception  on  his  part  that  it  was  not 
possible  to  do  so,  at  least  in  detail,  without  falling  into 
pseudo-science. 

But  how  does  Brunetiere,  after  thus  abandoning  to 
evolution,  to  the  region  of  the  relative,  nearly  every- 
thing that  was  regarded  by  old-time  critics  as  fixed  and 
stationary,  manage  to  find  a  basis  for  "  dogmatic  "  criti- 
cism? What  standard  is  there  raised  above  the  realm 
of  flux  and  change,  with  reference  to  which  a  work  of 
art  may  be  ranked  as  good  or  bad?  How  are  we  to  es- 
cape in  our  literary  judgments  from  the  web  of  illusion 
thrown  about  us  by  our  own  temperaments,  and  from 
the  fancies  and  passing  fashions  of  the  society  in  which 
we  live?  How,  finally,  are  we  to  be  rescued  from  the 
impressions  of  M.  Anatole  France?  Brunetiere's  imme- 
diate answer  to  these  questions,  is  that  we  must  subor- 
dinate our  sensations  and  emotions  to  reason.  If  we 
enter  more  deeply  into  his  thought,  we  find  that  he  was 
led  in  the  search  for  an  absolute  to  what  may  be  termed 
the  belief  in  an  absolute  man,  to  the  Platonic,  or  the 
scholastic  conception  of  "  humanity."  He  would  measure 
the  value  of  a  work  of  art  according  as  it  expresses  this 
universal  and  essential  humanity ;  according  as  it  unites 
the  power  of  giving  a  high  degree  of  aesthetic  pleasure 
with  that  of  suggesting  truly  human  thoughts  and 
emotions. 

The  doctrine  of  the  absolute  man  is  in  itself  only  a 


328  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

metaphysical  abstraction,  and  Brunetiere  refused  to  rest 
his  criticism  directly  upon  it.  For  an  absolute  based  on 
this  speculative  unity  of  the  human  spirit  he  substituted 
in  practice  an  absolute  based  on  the  unity  of  the  human 
spirit  as  it  has  manifested  itself  in  history.  To  the  per- 
sonal preferences  and  impressions  of  any  particular  man 
he  opposes  the  testimony  and  experience  of  all  men  as 
embodied  in  tradition.  That  writer  is  most  truly  human, 
and  consequently  most  worthy  of  praise,  who  has  appealed 
through  successive  generations  to  the  largest  number  of 
men.  An  opinion  carries  weight  with  Brunetiere  in  pro- 
portion as  it  is  ancient  and  universal.  He  did  not  hesitate 
to  curtail  the  individual's  right  of  independent  judg- 
men,  as  he  curtailed  the  individual's  right  of  independent 
creation,  and  all  to  the  greater  glory  and  profit  of  human 
nature  in  general.  The  question  at  issue  between  Bru- 
netiere and  the  impressionists  is  so  fundamental  that  I 
have  reserved  the  full  discussion  of  it  for  the  closing 
chapter. 

VI 

Enough  has  been  said  to  make  clear  that  the  great 
problem  of  Brunetiere's  life  was  that  of  finding  stand- 
ards to  oppose  to  the  universal  laxity  and  self-indulg- 
ence of  his  time,  —  to  what  he  called  the  "  morbid  and 
monstrous  development  of  the  me " l ;  and  that  his 
solution  of  this  problem  was  from  the  outset  extremely 
conservative.  The  reactionary  tendencies  of  the  last 
ten  years  of  his  life  follow  naturally  enough  from  his 
earlier  assumptions,  especially  the  assumption  that 

1  Questions  de  Critique,  214. 


BRUNETIERE  329 

there  is  needed  a  principle  of  restraint  in  human  na- 
ture (un  principe  refrenant),  and  that  this  principle 
cannot  be  evolved  by  the  individual  himself,  but  must 
be  "  exterior,  anterior  and  superior  "  to  the  individual. 
As  a  result  of  its  loss  of  traditional  standards,  modern 
society  seemed  to  him  to  be  plunging  into  a  bottomless 
morass  of  impressionism.  Of  course  the  modern  school 
gets  around  Brunetiere's  difficulty  by  offering  as  a  sub- 
stitute for  the  principle  of  restraint  the  principle  of 
brotherhood;  each  man  is  to  give  a  loose  rein  to  his 
own  instincts  and  "  originality,"  and  then  temper  this 
explosion  of  egoism  by  sympathy  with  an  equally  free 
play  of  individual  impulse  in  others.  This  is  the  theory  of 
fraternal  anarchy  found  in  Rousseau,  and  in  his  Amer- 
ican congener,  Walt  Whitman.  But  modern  France, 
according  to  Brunetiere,  has,  in  following  Rousseau, 
taken  a  madman  for  its  guide.  He  thinks  we  may 
make  fine  distinctions  about  different  kinds  of  individ- 
ualism, but  in  practice  they  are  all  synonyms  for  ego- 
ism ;  they  all  offer  an  undue  opening  to  "  the  mobility 
of  our  impressions,  the  unruliness  of  our  individual  sense, 
and  the  vagrancy  of  our  thought." 

In  other  words,  Brunetiere  fails  to  escape  from  the 
vicious  dilemma  of  nineteenth-century  thought  which 
would  either  sacrifice  the  individual  to  society  or  society 
to  the  individual;  which  fails  to  find  a  middle  ground 
between  anarchical  self-assertion  and  a  collectivism 
that  would  crush  individual  initiative.  We  may  at  least 
agree  with  him  that  a  society  that  discards  all  the  tra- 

1  Discours  de  combat,  2J  s£rie,  151. 


330  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

ditional  ways  of  unifying  life,  and  then  thinks  it  can 
get  on  without  working  out  any  new  unity  to  oppose 
to  individual  impulse,  may  turn  out  to  be  strangely  de- 
luded. The  opposing  attitudes  of  Brunetiere  and  M. 
France  towards  this  problem  have  at  least  the  merit  of 
reflecting  faithfully  a  main  line  of  cleavage  in  contem- 
porary French  thought.  Indeed,  one  can  scarcely  speak 
of  the  need  of  respect,  authority  and  discipline  in 
France  without  at  once  being  set  down  as  a  reaction- 
ary. If  France  does  not  get  beyond  this  stage,  and  yet 
prospers  in  a  large  way,  all  the  sages  of  the  past  will 
have  been  convicted  of  error  in  their  views  of  human 
nature ;  and  this  in  itself  will  be  a  result  of  consider- 
able interest. 

The  reasons  that  led  Brunetiere  into  the  Catholic 
Church  should  now  be  clear.  It  alone  seemed  to  him  to 
afford  the  discipline  and  the  definite  standards  that  could 
protect  society  against  the  individual.  The  motives 
for  his  conversion,  as  he  himself  says,  were  "  social  " ; 
they  are  certainly  as  far  removed  as  possible  from  the 
motives  of  those  who  are  drawn  into  the  Church  by  the 
aesthetic  charm  of  its  ritual.  Of  this  form  of  epicureanism 
he  remarks  contemptuously  that "  sensuality  is  not  reli- 
gion." He  turned  to  Catholicism  simply  because  it  seemed 
to  him  to  hold  out  the  hope  of  a  better-ordered  social 
progress,  of  a  more  thoroughly  disciplined  collectivism. 
It  is  misleading  to  say,  as  is  often  done,  that  Brunetiere 
had  a  "  seventeenth-century  soul,"  or,  like  M.  de  Vogue, 
to  compare  him  with  Bossuet  and  Pascal.  Brunetiere's 
constant  preoccupation  with  the  humanitarian  problem 


BRUNETrtlRE  331 

—  the  future  of  society  and  the  relations  of  man  to 
his  fellow-man — savors  of  Auguste  Comte  rather  than 
of  Bossuet.  In  his  inner  mood,  again,  he  has  more  in  com- 
mon with  Schopenhauer  than  with  Pascal.  It  is  enough 
to  compare  Brunetiere's  "social  reasons"  with  the  bit  of 
parchment  found  sewn  into  Pascal's  coat,  on  which  he 
had  recorded  the  details  of  his  conversion  (night  of 
November  23,  1654).  Pascal  sums  up  this  sudden  illu- 
mination in  the  words,  often  repeated,  "  Joy,  certainty, 
peace."  Brunetiere  was  a  true  child  of  his  age  in  that 
he  sought  salvation  in  work  and  not  in  meditation ;  or 
rather,  for  the  stoic  Brunetiere  as  for  the  epicurean 
Sainte-Beuve,  work  was,  by  their  own  avowal,  a  means 
of  escape  from  the  abyss  of  metaphysical  despair. 
Brunetiere  was  accused  of  being  out  of  touch  with  his 
time.  On  the  contrary,  if  his  work  fails  to  wear  well,  it 
may  be  because  he  was  in  too  close  touch  with  his  time. 
He  lacked  the  intuitions  by  which  alone  one  can  escape 
from  the  spirit  of  the  age  into  the  spirit  of  the  ages. 
He  had  little  experience  of  that  wisdom  which  Joubert 
defines  as  "  repose  in  the  light."  He  is  also  very  in- 
ferior to  Sainte-Beuve  and  even  to  M.  Lemaitre  in 
aesthetic  perceptiveness.  To  this  poverty  in  the  two 
main  types  of  intuition  is  to  be  attributed  his  small 
power  of  either  emotional  or  intellectual  suggestion. 
He  is  always  lucid  but  rarely  luminous.  "  He  sets  such 
great  store,"  says  M.  Lemaitre,  "on  precision,  that 
nothing  exists  for  him  which  cannot  be  expressed  with 
rigorous  exactness."  l  (This  is  the  trait,  it  will  be  re- 

1  Contemporains,  I,  225. 


332  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

membered,  that  Charles  Lamb  discovered  in  Scotchmen 
and  that  led  him  to  say  that  his  own  mind  was  in  its 
constitution  essentially  anti-Caledonian.) 

Brunetiere's  lack  of  intuitiveness  impairs  not  only 
his  defence  of  religious  tradition,  —  it  impairs  also  his 
defence  of  tradition  in  literature.  He  did  not  take  suf- 
ficiently into  account  in  either  religion  or  literature  the 
aristocratic  elements  that  make  directly  for  the  perfect- 
ing of  the  individual  and  only  indirectly  for  the  per- 
fecting of  society.  What  Sainte-Beuve  lamented  in  the 
decay  of  humane  letters  was  the  disappearance  from  the 
world  of  delicacy  and  distinction,  and  not  simply  the 
weakening  of  a  discipline.  The  point  may  be  made 
clear  by  comparing  the  attitude  of  the  two  men  towards 
Balzac.  Both  Balzac  and  Hugo  are  indeed  veritable 
touchstones  for  the  critic,  being  as  they  are  writers  of 
immense  power,  but  a  power  Titanic  and  Cyclopean 
rather  than  human.  Brunetiere  ascribes  Sainte-Beuve's 
hostility  to  Balzac  to  personal  pique  and  jealousy.  Per- 
sonal pique  there  certainly  was,  but  the  underlying 
ground  of  Sainte-Beuve's  hostility,  as  I  have  tried  to 
show  elsewhere,  was  his  humanism  —  the  fact,  as  he 
himself  says,  that  "  he  still  belongs  in  spite  of  every- 
thing to  the  classical  school."  Sainte-Beuve  shows  him- 
self a  better  humanist  than  Brunetiere,  when  he  admires 
Balzac's  exuberant  creative  energy,  but  at  the_sam,e 
time  is  repelled  by  bis  violence  and  lack  of  measure. 

Many  readers  of  Brunetiere's  volume  on  Balzac  have 
doubtless  been  puzzled  by  his  warmth  of  admiration  for 
a  writer  who,  as  he  truly  says,  had  immense  influence 


BRUNETl^RE  333 


in  promoting  the  whole  French  naturalistic  movement 
from  Taine  to  Zola,  and  was  himself  an  unchained  force 
of  nature.1  Did  not  Brunetiere  begin  his  career  as  a 
critic  by  an  onslaught  on  the  naturalistic  novel,  and 
is  he  not  always  urging  us  to  react  against  the  "  natu- 
ralism that  we  still  have  in  our  blood,"  and  become 
"  idealists  "  ?  The  difficulty  will  be  at  least  partly  solved 
if  we  remember  that  Balzac  and  Brunetiere  both  became 
Catholics  and  for  somewhat  similar  reasons.  Balzac 
failed  to  find  in  the  individual  life  any  resource  against 
itself  ;  Le  depicted  it  not  as  a~strtlggle  between  a  higher 
and  a  lower  nature,  but  merely  as  the  unfolding  of  a 
master  impulse  that  is  determined  in  turn  by  the  pres- 
sure  of  an  infinitely  complex  environment  :  he  was  un- 
able to  conceive  of  any  inner  avenue  of  escape  for  the 
individual  from  his  own  egoism  and  subjectivity,.  And 
to  individualism  a  social  solidarity  that 


receives  its  ultimate  sanction  from  the  Church.    Like 

—  ____       -  --  _     _  J""T'  1  .  _  -  -      __  — 

Brunetiere  he  sides  with  society  against  the  individual. 
In  their  return  to  the  discipline  of  the  past,  Brunetiere 
and  Balzac  both  take  their  point  of  departure  in  natu- 
ralistic pessimism.  If  we  had  no  other  evidence  in  the 
case  of  Brunetiere  his  sympathetic  study  of  Schopen- 
hauer would  suffice. 

An  inevitable  question  arises  in  dealing  with  this 
difficult  relationship  between  Brunetiere's  "  naturalism," 
and  his  "  idealism  "  :  How  did  he  reconcile  his  keen 
sense  of  historical  relativity  with  the  need  imposed  by 
his  logic  of  an  outer  absolute  ?  His  most  evident  ambi- 

1  Le  Roman  naturaliste,  165. 


334  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

tion  as  a  thinker  is  to  combine  the  faith  of  the  past  in 
what  is  stable  with  the  modern  idea  of  development. 
Even  dogma  itself  evolves,  he  asserts,  and  in  all  this 
part  of  his  thought  it  is  easy  enough  to  trace  the  influ- 
ence of  Cardinal  Newman.  His  plea  for  a  Catholicism 
that  would  develop  in  harmony  with  some  of  the  aspir- 
ations of  modern  democracy  found  favor  with  Leo  XIII, 
but  has  been  far  less  acceptable  to  the  present  Pope. 
Brunetiere  entered  the  Church  to  escape  from  individ- 
ualism and  then  towards  the  end  found  himself  treated 
as  a  heretic.  The  final  impression,  as  in  the  case  of 
Taine  and  so  many  other  eminent  personalities  of  the 
last  century,  is  that  of  a  great  spiritual  solitude. 

Some  of  the  arguments  Brunetiere  brings  to  the 
defence  of  tradition  are  certainly  surprising.  In  fact 
one  suspects  in  him  a  violent  love  of  paradox  which  he 
gratifies  not  by  attacking  the  general  sense  of  mankind, 
but  by  the  means  he  employs  in  defending  it.  It  is,  he 
confesses,  an  undertaking  at  once  hazardous  and  novel 
to  press  into  the  service  of  Catholic  orthodoxy  Comte's 
"  Positive  Philosophy  "  and  the  "  Origin  of  Species." 
He  identifies  the  scientific  doctrine  of  heredity  and  the 
dogma  of  original  sin,  draws  a  parallel  between  the 
American  Constitution  and  the  Roman  Church,  and 
brings  Darwin  to  the  aid  of  St.  Vincent  de  Lerins.  We 
may  well  refuse  to  follow  him  in  these  bizarre  associa- 
tions ;  yet  we  must  recognize  that  he  is  wrestling  man- 
fully all  the  while  with  what  is  the  central  problem  of 
contemporary  thought,  the  problem  how  to  adjust  the 
rival  claims  of  "  being  "  and  "  becoming  " ;  how  to  re- 


BRUNETI^RE  335 

tain  the  conquests  of  naturalism  and  at  the  same  time 
assert  the  integrity  of  that  part  of  man  which  is  above 
phenomenal  nature. 

Brunetiere,  indeed,  has  an  almost  unerring  instinct 
for  the  large  and  vital  questions,  even  when  he  misses 
the  right  solution  of  them.  He  is  instructive  in  his 
errors,  even  in  his  failure  to  recognize  that  the  remedy 
for  the  excesses  of  individualism  must  be  a  saner  indi- 
vidualism, that  the  lance  of  Achilles  can  alone  heal  the 
wound  it  has  made.  There  are  few  more  effective  anti- 
dotes to  impressionism  than  to  read  him  through  with 
a  view  to  refuting  him.  He  may  be  recommended  as  a 
corrective  to  those  who  suffer  from  epicurean  indolence 
and  unwillingness  to  think.  It  is  some  distinction  to 
have  attained,  as  Brunetiere  did,  even  to  a  logical  cos- 
mos in  an  age  whose  current  philosophy  would  seem  to 
be  what  a  Harvard  undergraduate,  replying  to  a  ques- 
tion as  to  the  religion  of  China,  described  as  confusion- 
ism.  The  atmosphere  that  surrounds  his  work  has  the 
stoic  bleakness ;  yet  he  is  tonic  by  the  very  faith  he  feels 
in  the  virtues  of  clear  and  consistent  reasoning.  "  Who  of 
us,"  says  Brunetiere,  "  is  without  his  weaknesses  ?  Mine 

—  one  of  mine  —  has  always  been  to  love  doctrinaires ; 
and  see  how  indulgent  I  am  towards  them :  I  pardon  them 
not  only  for  having  had  doctrines  and  for  having  de- 
fended them  sturdily,  but  for  having  changed  doctrines, 
every  time  they  have  given  good  reasons  for  so  doing, 

—  I  mean  good  doctrinal  ones."  l  He  is  convinced  that 
"  ideas  govern  the  world." 2  Herein  he  differs  from  M. 

1  Nouveaux  essais  de  lit.  cont.t  314.     *  Discows  de  combat,  2'  adrie,  172. 


336  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Faguet,  a  really  distinguished  thinker,  who  has  no  be- 
lief in  the  practical  efficacy  of  thought ;  and  that  is 
perhaps  why  much  of  M.  Faguet's  work,  brilliant  as  it 
undoubtedly  is,  fails  to  leave  its  sting.  "  Take  Rous- 
seau from  the  history  of  the  eighteenth  century,"  writes 
Brunetiere,  "  and  you  put  off  the  Revolution  by  perhaps 
twenty  or  twenty-five  years ;  take  from  his  writings  the 
i  Social  Contract '  and  you  make  the  Jacobin  programme 
impossible;  take  from  the  ' Social  Contract'  itself  merely 
the  sixth  and  seventh  chapters  of  the  fourth  book,  and 
you  suppress  Robespierre."  Fortunately  the  connection 
between  logic  and  life  is  not  always  so  close. 

Brunetiere  had  only  contempt  for  those  who  would 
divorce  scholarship  from  ideas,  or  who,  having  ideas,  fail 
to  subordinate  them  to  some  serious  end ;  contempt  for 
the  dilettantes  and  impressionists  who  see  in  literature 
only  the  occasion  for  an  agreeable  vagabondage  of  the 
intellect  or  sensibility ;  likewise  for  those  who  lose  them- 
selves in  over-minute  investigations:  for  instance,  the 
man  who  devoted  a  volume  of  five  hundred  pages  to 
proving  that  Moliere  died  at  No.  40  and  not  at  No.  34 
Rue  Richelieu ;  or  the  man  who  searched  through  the 
records  of  Paris  churches  —  eighty  manuscript  volumes 
—  in  order  to  determine  the  exact  date  of  the  birth  of 
Ninon  de  Lenclos !  In  one  of  his  most  vigorous  papers 
("  La  Fureur  de  1'Inedit ")  he  assails  what  is  perhaps 
the  main  fetish  of  modern  scholarship,  —  "  original " 
research.  "  Science  and  conscientiousness,"  he  exclaims, 
"  delicacy  of  taste,  tact,  the  art  of  selection  and  compos- 
ition, feeling  for  style,  felicity  of  expression,  art  or 


BRUNETlfeRE  337 

grace,  eloquence  or  strength,  all  that  formerly  went 
under  the  name  of  talent  or  even  genius,  —  do  any  of 
these  qualities  really  count  in  the  eyes  of  a  decipherer 
of  texts  or  an  editor  of  unpublished  documents?  And 
public  opinion,  which  they  have  already  more  than  half 
corrupted,  seems  likely  soon  to  side  with  them."  *  Bru- 
netiere  waged  continuous  war  on  this  tendency  of 
scholarship  towards  Alexandrianism,  towards  what  Bacon 
termed,  in  speaking  of  spelling  reform,  "  unprofitable 
subtleties."  No  one  in  his  generation  so  emphasized  the 
relationship  between  literature  and  thought,  the  relation- 
ship between  thought  itself  and  life. 

"  Le  vrai  Dieu,  le  Dieu  fort,  est  le  Dieu  des  id^es." 

It  is  a  pity  that  the  needed  example  he  sets  in  this 
respect  should  be  compromised  by  the  reactionary  trend 
of  his  thinking  ;  that  men  who  are  his  inferiors  in  the 
scholarship  of  ideas  and  even  in  the  scholarship  of  facts 
should  yet  have  the  advantage,  in  attacking  him,  of  at 
least  seeming  to  be  champions  of  the  modern  spirit. 

1  Nouvelles  questions  de  critique,  28. 


XI 

CONCLUSION 

WE  are  told  that  Louis  XIV  once  submitted  a  son- 
net he  had  written  to  the  judgment  of  Boileau,  who 
said,  after  reading  it :  "  Sire,  nothing  is  impossible  for 
your  Majesty.  You  set  out  to  write  some  bad  verses 
and  you  have  succeeded."  The  point  of  this  story  for 
the  modern  reader  lies  not  so  much  in  the  courage  of 
the  critic  as  in  the  meekness  of  the  king.  With  the 
progress  of  democracy  one  man's  opinion  in  literature 
has  come  to  be  as  good  as  another's,  —  a  deal  better, 
too,  the  Irishman  would  add,  —  and  such  words  as  de- 
ference and  humility  are  in  a  fair  way  to  become  obso- 
lete. We  can  scarcely  conceive  to  what  an  extent  men 
once  allowed  their  personal  impressions  to  be  overawed 
and  held  in  check  by  a  body  of  outer  prescriptions. 
Only  a  century  ago  an  Edinburgh  reviewer  could  write  : 
"  Poetry  has  thus  much  at  least  in  common  with  reli- 
gion, that  its  standards  were  fixed  long  ago  by  certain 
inspired  writers  whose  authority  it  is  no  longer  lawful 
to  question." 1  Racine  tells  us  that  the  audience  was 
afraid  at  the  first  performance  of  his  comedy  "Les 
Plaideurs,"  that  "  it  had  not  laughed  according  to  the 
rules." 

The  revolt  came  at  last  from  this  tyranny  of  the 
ft  rules,"  and  the  romantic  critics  opposed  to  the  neo- 

1  Article  on  Southey,  Edinburgh  Review,  October,  1802. 


CONCLUSION  339 

classic  narrowness  their  plea  for  wider  knowledge  and 
wider  sympathy ;  they  would  see  before  they  began  to 
oversee,  and  be  historical  rather  than  dogmatic  ;  they 
would  neither  exclude  nor  conclude,  but  explain ;  above 
all,  they  would  be  appreciative,  and  substitute  the  fruit- 
ful criticism  of  beauties  for  the  barren  criticism  of 
faults.  The  weakness  of  this  whole  school  has  been  its 
proneness  to  forget  that  knowledge  and  sympathy  are 
after  all  only  the  feminine  virtues  of  the  critic.  Hence 
the  absence  of  the  masculine  note  in  so  much  modern 
criticism,  hence  the  tendency  of  judgment  to  be  swal- 
lowed up  completely  in  sympathy  and  comprehension  — 
tout  comprendre,  c'est  tout  par donner.  Renan,  one  of 
the  most  perfect  embodiments  of  the  ideal  of  wider 
knowledge  and  wider  sympathy,  says  that  when  any  one 
was  presented  to  him  he  tried  to  enter  into  this  person's 
point  of  view,  and  serve  up  to  him  his  own  ideas  in 
advance.  One  thinks  almost  involuntarily  of  Dr.  John- 
son and  how,  when  people  disagreed  with  him,  he  "  roared 
them  down  "  ;  how  men  like  Reynolds  and  Gibbon  and 
Burke  ventured  to  present  their  protest  to  him  only  in 
the  form  of  a  Round  Robin  so  that  the  awful  Aris- 
tarch  might  not  know  on  whom  first  to  visit  his  wrath. 
It  is  of  course  well,  and  indeed  indispensable,  that  the 
critic  should  cultivate  the  feminine  virtues,  but  on  con- 
dition, as  Tennyson  has  put  it,  that  he  be  man-woman  and 
not  woman-man.  Through  neglect  of  this  truth  criti- 
cism has  tended  in  its  development  during  the  past  cen- 
tury to  become  first  a  form  of  history,  and  then  a  form 
of  biography,  and  finally  a  form  of  gossip.  History  and 


340  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

biography  remind  us  in  their  gradual  encroachments 
upon  critical  judgment  of  those  mayors  of  the  palace  in 
Merovingian  times  who  insinuated  themselves  under 
cover  of  the  services  they  rendered  and  at  last  thrust 
themselves  into  their  masters'  place.  It  is  true  that 
judgment  would  not  have  been  thus  dispossessed  if  it 
had  not  first  shown  itself  a  roi  faineant. 


Sainte-Beuve  himself,  as  we  saw,  labored  during  the 
latter  part  of  his  life  to  correct,  or  one  might  more 
fairly  say  to  complete,  his  earlier  method  and  to  assert 
once  more  the  supremacy  of  judgment.  It  is  curious  to 
trace  the  transformation  of  the  militant  romanticist  of 
1830  into  the  conservative  who  finally  extols  as  the  true 
type  of  the  critic  Malherbe  and  Boileau  and  Dr.  John- 
son. He  follows  these  men  in  founding  his  own  judg- 
ments for  the  most  part  on  the  traditional  standards  of 
the  classicist,  yet  no  one  knew  better  than  Sainte-Beuve 
that  these  standards  were  doomed.  "  Let  us  be  the  last  of 
our  kind,"  he  exclaims,  "before  the  great  confusion."1 

The  "  great  confusion  "  that  Sainte-Beuve  foresaw  is 
now  upon  us.  I  pointed  out  that  he  himself  has  been 
correctly  defined  in  his  influence  on  his  successors,  not 
as  a  defender  of  standards  and  judgment,  but  as  a  great 
doctor  of  relativity.  Now  nearly  all  recent  criticism,  so 
far  as  it  is  anything  more  than  a  form  of  gossip  and 
small  talk,  may  be  roughly  classified  as  either  impres- 
sionistic or  scientific ;  and  it  is  in  this  doctrine  of  rela- 

1  Portraits  litteraires,  m,  550. 


CONCLUSION  341 

tivity  that  both  impressionistic  and  scientific  critics 
unite.  The  impressionist  is  interested  in  a  book  only  as 
it  relates  itself  to  his  sensibility,  and  his  manner  of 
praising  anything  that  makes  this  appeal  to  him  is  to 
say  that  it  is  "  suggestive."  The  scientific  critic  for  his 
part  is  interested  solely  in  the  way  a  book  is  related  as 
a  phenomenon  to  other  phenomena,  and  when  it  is  the 
culminating  point  or  the  point  of  departure  of  a  large 
number  of  these  relationships,  he  says  that  it  is  "sig- 
nificant" (the  favorite  word  of  Goethe).  If  the  impres- 
sionist is  asked  to  rise  above  his  sensibility  and  judge 
by  a  more  impersonal  standard,  he  answers  that  there 
is  no  such  impersonal  element  in  art,  but  only  "  suggest- 
iveness,"  and  is  almost  ready  to  define  art  with  a  recent 
French  writer  as  an  "  attenuated  hypnosis."  If  the 
scientific  critic  in  turn  is  urged  to  get  behind  the  phe- 
nomena and  rate  a  book  with  reference  to  a  scale  of 
absolute  values,  he  absconds  into  his  theory  of  the 
"  unknowable." 

We  may  illustrate  by  a  familiar  passage  from  Taine, 
who  is  easily  the  most  eminent  of  those  who  have 
attempted  to  make  criticism  scientific.  "  What  do  we 
see,"  he  says  in  his  English  Literature,  "under  the  fair 
glazed  pages  of  a  modern  poem  ?  A  modern  poet  who 
has  studied  and  travelled,  a  man  like  Alfred  de  Musset, 
Victor  Hugo,  Lamartine  or  Heine,  in  a  black  coat  and 
gloves,  welcomed  by  the  ladies,  and  making  every  even- 
ing his  fifty  bows  and  his  score  of  bons-mots  in  society  ; 
reading  the  papers  in  the  morning,  lodging  as  a  rule  on 
a  second  floor;  not  over  gay,  because  he  has  nerves,  and 


342  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

especially  because,  in  this  dense  democracy  where  we 
stifle  one  another,  the  discredit  of  official  dignities  has 
exaggerated  his  pretensions,  while  increasing  his  import- 
ance, and  because  the  keenness  of  his  feelings  in  general 
rather  disposes  him  to  think  himself  a  god." 

Now  in  the  first  place  the  results  of  this  attempt  to 
infer  from  a  poem  the  life  and  personality  of  the  poet 
are  strangely  uncertain.  We  read  in  the  recently  pub- 
lished letters  of  John  Richard  Green  that  when  Taine 
was  in  England  getting  information  for  the  last  vol- 
ume of  his  "  English  Literature,"  he  began  talking  about 
Tennyson  with  Palgrave,  a  great  friend  of  the  laureate. 
"  Was  n't  he  in  early  youth  rich,  luxurious,  fond  of 
pleasure,  self-indulgent  ?  "  Taine  asked.  "  I  see  it  all 
in  his  early  poems  —  his  riot,  his  adoration  of  physical 
beauty,  his  delight  in  jewels,  in  the  abandonment  of  all 
to  pleasure,  in  wine,  and  ..."  "  Stop !  stop  ! "  said 
Palgrave,  out  of  all  patience.  "  As  a  young  man  Tenny- 
son was  poor  —  he  had  little  more  than  one  hundred 
pounds  a  year,  his  habits  were,  as  they  still  are,  simple 
and  reserved,  he  cared  then  as  he  cares  now  for  little  more 
than  a  chat  and  a  pipe ;  he  has  never  known  luxury  in 
your  sense."  Taine  thanked  Palgrave  for  his  informa- 
tion — and  when  the  book  came  out  Tennyson  was  found 
still  painted  as  the  young  voluptuary  of  the  critic's 
fancy.1 

Even  assuming  that  Taine's  inferences  could  be  drawn 
correctly,  he  would  have  us  fix  our  attention  on  precisely 

1  Letters  of  John  Richard  Green,  372.     Green's  anecdote  is  perhaps  not 
entirely  fair  to  Taine's  account  of  Tennyson  as  it  finally  appeared. 


CONCLUSION  343 

those  features  of  a  poem  that  are  least  poetical.  The  very 
prosaic  facts  he  is  looking  for  would  be  at  least  as  visi- 
ble in  the  writing  of  some  mediocrity  as  in  a  work  of 
the  first  order.  It  is,  indeed,  when  Taine  starts  out  to 
deal  in  this  fashion  with  a  poet  of  genius  like  Milton, 
to  reduce  "Paradise  Lost"  to  a  mere  "sign,"  that  the 
whole  method  is  seen  to  be  grotesquely  inadequate. 
"Adam,"  says  Taine  in  his  critique  of  Milton,  "is  your 
true  pater-familias  with  a  vote,  an  M.P.,  an  old  Oxford 
man,"  etc.  He  listens  to  the  conversation  of  Adam  and 
Eve,  the  first  pair,  only  to  hear  "  an  English  household, 
two  reasoners  of  the  period — Colonel  Hutchinson  and 
his  wife.  Good  heavens !  dress  them  at  once " ;  and  he 
continues  in  this  vein  for  pages. 

But,  says  M.  Bourget,  speaking  for  the  impressionists, 
there  is  another  way  of  approaching  the  volume  of  verse 
that  Taine  would  treat  solely  from  the  point  of  view  of 
its  "  significance ";  and  in  rendering  the  "suggestive- 
ness  "  of  the  volume  to  the  impressionist  sensibility,  M. 
Bourget  proceeds  to  employ  a  luxuriance  of  epithet  that 
lack  of  space  forbids  our  quoting.  He  asks  us  to  imagine 
a  young  woman  alone  in  her  boudoir  on  an  overcast 
winter  afternoon.  A  vague  melancholy  steals  upon  her 
as  she  reclines  at  ease  in  her  long  chair;  all  a-quiver 
with  ineffable  longing,  she  turns  to  her  favorite  poet. 
She  does  not  surmise  behind  the  delicately  tinted  pages 
of  the  beloved  book  the  prosaic  facts  of  environment, 
the  obscure  animal  origins  of  talent  that  are  so  visible 
to  Taine.  What  she  does  perceive  is  the  dream  of  the 
poet  —  "  the  inexpressible  and  mysterious  beyond  that 


344  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

he  has  succeeded  in  throwing  like  a  halo  round  his 
verses."  For  Taine  the  stanzas  are  a  result ;  for  the  young 
woman  "  who  intoxicates  her  heart  with  them  so  deli- 
ciously,"  they  are  a  cause.  "  She  does  not  care  for  the 
alembic  in  which  the  magic  philter  has  been  distilled, 
provided  only  this  magic  is  operative,  provided  her  read- 
ing culminates  in  an  exquisite  and  trembling  exaltation," 
and  "  suggests  to  her  dreams  either  sweet  or  sad,  but 
always  productive  of  ecstasy."  Who  does  not  see,  con- 
cludes M.  Bourget,  that  entirely  different  theories  of  art 
are  implied  in  the  two  ways  of  approaching  the  volume 
of  verse?  1 

The  two  theories  are  different,  indeed;  yet  they  are 
alike  in  this,  that  neither  the  "  significance  "  of  the  vol- 
ume to  Taine  nor  its  "  suggestiveness  "  to  M.  Bourget 
affords  any  real  means  of  escape  from  the  quicksands  of 
relativity  to  some  firm  ground  of  judgment.  We  may  be 
sure  that  a  third-rate  bit  of  contemporary  sentimentality 
will "  suggest "  more  ineffable  dreams  to  the  young  woman 
in  the  long  chair  than  a  play  of  Sophocles.  To  state  the 
case  more  generally,  how  many  books  there  are  that  were 
once  infinitely  suggestive  and  are  still  of  the  highest 
significance  in  literary  history  which  yet  intrinsically  are 
now  seen  to  be  of  very  inferior  value !  This  is  eminently 
true  of  certain  writings  of  Rousseau,  to  whom  much  of 
the  peculiar  exaggeration  of  the  sens  propre,  or  individ- 
ual sense  that  one  finds  in  the  impressionists,  can  ulti- 
mately be  traced.2  If  the  special  modes  of  sensibility  that 

1  Abridged  from  the  chapter  on  Taine  in  Essais  de  Psychologic  contempo- 
raine. 

*  "  Yoici  enfin  Jean-Jacques,  pr&urseor  du  xixe  siecle,  qui  dans  1'indi- 


CONCLUSION  345 

impressionism  exhibits  go  back  to  Rousseau,  its  philo- 
sophical theory  may  best  be  considered  as  a  reappearance 
in  modern  thought  of  the  ancient  maxim  that  man  is 
the  measure  of  all  things.  This  celebrated  dictum  be- 
came current  at  a  decisive  moment  in  Greek  life  and 
would  indeed  seem  to  sum  up  almost  necessarily  the  point 
of  view  of  any  age  that  has  cast  off  traditional  standards. 
The  all-important  question  is  whether  one  interprets  the 
maxim  in  the  spirit  of  the  sophists  or  in  that  of  Socrates. 
The  resemblance  between  the  impressionistic  and  the 
sophistical  understanding  of  the  maxim  is  unmistakable ; 
not  only  the  individual  man,  but  his  present  sensations 
and  impressions  are  to  be  made  the  measure  of  all  things. 
"  All  of  us,"  says  M.  Anatole  France,  "judge  everything 
by  our  own  measure.  How  could  we  do  otherwise,  since 
to  judge  is  to  compare,  and  we  have  only  one  measure, 
which  is  ourselves ;  and  this  measure  is  constantly  chang- 
ing? We  are  all  of  us  the  sport  and  playthings  of  mobile 
appearances." a  Perhaps  no  recent  writer  has  shown  more 
of  the  Socratic  spirit  in  his  use  of  the  maxim  than  Emer- 
son. "  A  true  man,"  he  says,  "  belongs  to  no  other  time 
and  place,  but  is  the  centre  of  things.  Where  he  is, 
there  is  nature.  He  measures  you  and  all  men  and  all 
events."  Though  Emerson  thus  asserts  the  maxim,  he 
has  not  therefore  succumbed,  like  M.  France,  to  the  doc- 
trine of  relativity  and  the  feeling  of  universal  illusion 
that  accompanies  it ;  on  the  contrary,  he  has  attained  to 

vidu,  c'est-a-dire  dans  le  Moi  affectif  et  passionnel,  voit  la  mesure  unique 
de  toute  chose."   Pellissier,  Etudes  de  Litterature  contemporaine.  Cf.  Bru- 
neti&re,  Nouvelles  questions  de  critique,  214. 
1   Vie  lit.,  i,  318. 


346  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

a  new  sense  of  the  unity  of  human  nature  —  a  unity 
founded,  not  on  tradition,  but  on  insight.  He  says  some- 
where that  he  finds  such  an  identity  both  of  thought 
and  sentiment  in  the  best  books  of  the  world,  that  they 
seem  to  him  to  be  the  work  of  "  one  all-seeing,  all-hear- 
ing gentleman."  Now  it  is  evidently  this  one  all-seeing, 
all-hearing  gentleman  who  is  for  Emerson  the  measure 
of  all  things.  The  individual  man  is  the  measure  of  all 
things  only  in  so  far  as  he  has  realized  in  himself  this 
essential  human  nature.  To  be  sure,  the  line  is  often 
hard  to  draw  in  practice  between  the  two  types  of  in- 
dividualist. There  were  persons  in  ancient  Athens  —  for 
example,  Aristophanes  in  the  "  Clouds  "  —  who  treated 
Socrates  as  an  ordinary  sophist.  In  the  same  way,  there 
are  persons  to-day  who  fail  to  see  the  difference  between 
Emerson  and  an  ordinary  impressionist.  "  The  source  of 
Emerson's  power,"  says  Professor  Santayana,  "lay  not  in 
his  doctrine  but  in  his  temperament."  l 

Emerson's  language  is  often  indistinguishable  from 
that  of  the  impressionist.  "I  would  write  on  the  lintels 
of  my  doorpost,  whim."  "  Dream  delivers  us  to  dream, 
and  there  is  no  end  to  illusion."  "Life  is  a  flux  of 
moods."  But  he  is  careful  to  add  that  "  there  is  that  in 
us  which  changes  not  and  which  ranks  all  sensations 
and  states  of  mind."  The  impressionist  denies  this  ele- 
ment of  absolute  judgment  and  so  feels  free  to  indulge 
his  temperament  with  epicurean  indolence ;  at  the  same 
time  he  has  the  contemptuous  indulgence  for  others 
that  befits  beings  who  are  the  "  sport  and  playthings  of 

1  Poetry  and  Religim,  218. 


CONCLUSION  347 

mobile  appearances."  M.  France  says  that  he  "despises 
men  tenderly."  We  would  reply  in  the  words  of  Burke 
that  the  "  species  of  benevolence  which  arises  from  con- 
tempt is  no  true  charity."  Impressionism  has  led  to  a 
strange  increase  in  the  number  of  dilettantes  and 
jouisseurs  litteraires,  who  to  the  precept  de  gustibus 
non  have  given  developments  that  would  certainly 
have  surprised  its  author.  The  Horatian  plea  for  an 
honest  liberty  of  taste  has  its  necessary  corrective  in 
the  truth  that  is  very  bluntly  stated  in  a  Spanish  pro- 
verb :  "  There  are  tastes  that  deserve  the  cudgel."  :  We 
are  told  that  Sainte-Beuve  was  once  so  offended  by  an 
outrageous  offence  to  good  taste  in  a  remark  of  Nicol- 
ardot's,  that,  yielding  to  an  irresistible  impulse,  he 
kicked  him  out  of  the  room.  Dante,  in  replying  to  a 
certain  opponent,  says,  with  the  instinct  of  a  true  Ital- 
ian, that  he  would  like  to  answer  such  "  bestiality  not 
with  words  but  with  a  knife."  We  must  remember  that 
"  good  taste  "  as  formerly  understood  was  made  up  of 
two  distinct  elements :  first,  one's  individual  sensibility, 
and  secondly,  a  code  of  outer  rules  by  which  this  sen- 
sibility was  disciplined  and  held  in  check.  The  observ- 
ance of  these  rules  became  for  the  community  of  well- 
bred  people  a  sort  of  noblesse  oblige,  and  taste  in  this 
sense  has  been  rightly  defined  by  Bivarol  as  a  man's 
literary  honor.  Now  that  the  outer  code  has  been  ab- 
rogated, taste  is  not  therefore  delivered  over  to  the 
caprices  of  a  vagrant  sensibility ;  taste  is  attained  only 
when  this  sensibility  is  rectified  with  reference  to 

1  "  Hay  gustos  que  merecen  palos." 


348  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

standards  inwardly  apprehended,  and  in  this  sense  may 
be  defined  as  a  man's  literary  conscience ;  it  is,  in  short, 
only  one  aspect  of  the  struggle  between  our  lower  and 
higher  selves.  Some,  indeed,  would  maintain  that  taste 
is  not  a  thing  thus  to  be  won  by  any  effort  of  the  will, 
but  is  rather  an  inborn  and  incommunicable  tact,  a  sort 
of  mysterious  election,  a  free  gift  of  the  muses  to  a  pre- 
destined few ;  that  in  literature  many  are  called  and  few 
are  chosen.  In  the  article  "  Gout "  of  the  "  Philosophi- 
cal Dictionary,"  Voltaire  discourses  on  the  small  num- 
ber of  the  elect  in  matters  of  taste,  and  in  almost  the 
next  article  ("  Grace  ")  turns  all  his  powers  of  mockery 
on  those  who  assert  the  same  doctrine  in  religion.  Not 
only  individuals  but  whole  nations  were  once  held  to  be 
under  the  reprobation  of  the  muses.  As  Voltaire  says 
sadly,  presque  tout  Vunwers  est  barbare.  Perhaps  even 
to-day  persons  might  be  found  who  would  regard  as  le- 
gitimate the  famous  query  of  Father  Bouhours  whether 
a  German  can  have  wit.  There  are  only  too  many 
examples  in  Germany  and  elsewhere  of  how  far  infinite 
industry  and  good  intentions  are  from  sufficing  for  the 
attainment  of  taste.  However  it  may  be  in  theology, 
it  remains  true  in  literature,  as  Gautier  remarks,  that 
works  without  grace  are  of  no  avail. 

But  one  may  recognize  an  element  of  predestination 
in  the  problem  of  taste  and  not  therefore  acquiesce  in 
the  impressionist's  preaching  of  the  fatality  and  finality 
of  temperament.  Every  one,  to  be  sure,  has  an  initial  or 
temperamental  taste,  but  it  is  hard  to  say  how  far  this 
taste  may  be  transformed  by  subordinating  it  to  the 


CONCLUSION  349 

higher  claims  of  our  nature.  Dr.  Johnson  says  that  if 
he  had  no  duties  and  no  reference  to  futurity  he  should 
spend  his  life  in  driving  briskly  in  a  post-chaise  with  a 
pretty  woman.  Here  then  is  the  temperamental  taste  of 
Dr.  Johnson,  and  if  he  had  been  a  disciple  of  M.  France, 
he  might  have  accepted  it  as  final.  Boswell  reports  an 
outburst  of  Johnson  on  this  very  subject :  "  Do  not, 
Sir,  accustom  yourself  to  trust  to  impressions.  By 
trusting  to  impressions,  a  man  may  gradually  come  to 
yield  to  them,  and  at  length  be  subject  to  them,  so  as 
not  to  be  a  free  agent,  or  what  is  the  same  thing  in  effect, 
to  suppose  that  he  is  not  a  free  agent.  A  man  who  is  in 
that  state  should  not  be  suffered  to  live ;  .  .  .  there  can 
be  no  confidence  in  him,  no  more  than  in  a  tiger." 

Johnson  would  evidently  have  agreed  with  the  Bud- 
dhists in  looking  on  the  indolent  settling  down  of  a 
man  in  his  own  temperament l  as  the  chief  of  all  the 
deadly  sins.  A  fulmination  like  the  foregoing  is  good 
to  clear  the  air  after  the  debilitating  sophistries  of  M. 
France.  Yet  we  feel  that  Johnson's  point  of  view  im- 
plies an  undue  denial  of  the  individual's  right  to  his 
own  impressions  and  that  therefore  it  has  become  in 
some  measure  obsolete.  It  is  well  for  us,  after  all,  to 
have  fresh  and  vivid  and  personal  impressions ;  it  is 
well  for  us,  in  short,  to  awaken  our  senses ;  but  we 
should  "awaken  our  senses  that  we  may  the  better 

1  This  is  the  full  meaning  of  the  Pali  term  pamada.  The  opposite 
quality,  appamada,  or  stremiousness, — the  unremitting  exercise  of  the 
active  will,  —  is  the  chief  of  the  Buddhist  virtues  ;  this  Oriental  strenuous- 
ness,  one  should  hasten  to  add,  is  directed  towards  self-conquest  and  not, 
like  the  Occidental  variety,  towards  the  conquest  of  the  outer  world. 


350  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

judge  "  —  and  not  simply  that  we  may  the  better  enjoy. 
For  instance,  Walter  Pater  continually  dwells  on  the 
need  of  awakening  our  senses,  but  when  he  speaks  of 
"living  in  the  full  stream  of  refined  sensation,"  when 
he  urges  us  to  gather  ourselves  together  "  into  one  des- 
perate effort  to  see  and  touch,"  there  is  a  hedonistic 
flavor  in  these  utterances  that  can  escape  no  one.  On 
the  other  hand,  there  should  be  no  ascetic  denial  of  the 
value  of  the  impression  in  itself.  Brunetiere  is  reported 
to  have  said  to  another  critic,  whom  he  suspected  of 
intellectual  epicureanism,  "  You  always  praise  what 
pleases  you,  /  never  do."  l  This  is  an  asceticism  of  taste 
worthy  of  the  spectator  of  Racine's  comedy  who  wished 
to  laugh  according  to  the  rules.  And  so  Brunetiere 
was  led  naturally  into  his  reactionary  attitude  ;  seeing 
only  the  evil  possibilities  of  individualism,  he  would 
have  the  modern  man  forego  his  claim  to  be  the  meas- 
ure of  all  things,  and  submit  once  more  to  outer  author- 
ity. A  certain  type  of  seventeenth-century  critic  at- 
tempted to  establish  a  standard  that  was  entirely  outside 
the  individual.  The  impressionist  has  gone  to  the  op- 
posite extreme  and  set  up  a  standard  that  is  entirely 
within  the  individual.  The  problem  is  to  find  some 
middle  ground  between  Procrustes  and  Proteus ;  and 
this  right  mean  would  seem  to  lie  in  a  standard  that  is 
in  the  individual  and  yet  is  felt  by  him  to  transcend  his 
personal  self  and  lay  hold  of  that  part  of  his  nature 
that  he  possesses  in  common  with  other  men. 

1  See  Lemaitre,  Contemporains,  vi,  p.  xi.  Cf.  Brunetiere,  L'Evolution 
de  la  poesie  lyrique,  25. 


CONCLUSION  351 

The  impressionist  not  only  refuses  the  individual  man 
any  such  principle  of  judgment  to  which  he  may  appeal 
from  his  fleeting  impressions;  he  goes  farther  and 
refuses  men  collectively  any  avenue  of  escape  from 
universal  illusion  and  relativity;  he  denies  in  short  the 
doctrine  embodied  in  the  old  church  maxim,  Securus 
judicat  orbis  terrarum,  a  doctrine  so  fundamental,  we 
may  note  in  passing,  that  in  the  form  attributed  to 
Lincoln  it  has  become  the  cornerstone  of  democracy  : 
"  You  cannot  fool  all  the  people  all  the  time."  M.  Ana- 
tole  France  is  fond  of  insisting,  like  Sainte-Beuve  before 
him,  that  there  inheres  in  mankind  as  a  whole  no  such 
power  of  righting  itself  and  triumphing  over  its  own 
errors  and  illusions.  A  whole  chapter  might  be  made 
up  of  passages  from  Sainte-Beuve  on  the  vanity  of  fame. 
"Posterity  has  allowed  three  fourths  of  the  works  of 
antiquity  to  perish,"  says  M.  France  in  turn ;  "  it  has 
allowed  the  rest  to  be  frightfully  corrupted.  ...  In  the 
little  that  it  has  kept  there  are  detestable  books  which 
are  none  the  less  immortal.  Varius,  we  are  told,  was  the 
equal  of  Virgil.  He  has  perished.  ^Elian  was  an  ass,  and 
he  survives.  There  is  posterity  for  you,"1  etc.  Here 
again  the  contrast  between  the  two  types  of  individual- 
ist is  absolute.  "  There  is  no  luck  in  literary  reputation," 
says  Emerson.  "  They  who  make  up  the  final  verdict  for 
every  book  are  not  the  partial  and  noisy  public  of  the 
hour,  but  a  court  as  of  angels ;  a  public  not  to  be  bribed, 
not  to  be  entreated,  and  not  to  be  overawed  decides 
upon  every  man's  title  to  fame.  Only  those  books  come 

1  Vie  litteraire,  i,  111. 


352  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

down  which  deserve  to  last.  Blackmore,  Kotzebue,  or 
Pollock  may  endure  for  a  night,  but  Moses  and  Homer 
stand  forever.  The  permanence  of  all  books  is  fixed  by 
no  effort  friendly  or  hostile,  but  by  their  own  specific 
gravity  or  the  intrinsic  importance  of  their  contents  to 
the  constant  mind  of  man." 

We  should  add,  then,  in  order  to  define  our  critical 
standard  completely,  that  the  judgment  of  the  keen- 
sighted  few  in  the  present  needs  to  be  ratified  by  the 
verdict  of  posterity.1 

n 

Such  being  in  brief  outline  our  critical  standard,  it 
remains  to  consider  it  more  fully  in  its  bearings  on  the 
main  trend  of  contemporary  life  in  France  and  elsewhere. 
It  is  evident  that  under  existing  conditions  we  can 
scarcely  emphasize  the  first  part  of  our  definition  too 
strongly  (the  keen-sighted  few !).  If  it  is  not  possible  in 
literature  to  fool  all  the  public  all  the  time,  it  is  only 
too  possible  to  fool  all  or  nearly  all  the  public  some  of 
the  time,  and  some  of  the  public  all  the  time.  The  op- 
posite opinion  is  encouraged  by  the  force  now  most 
active  in  the  world  and  definable  as  Rousseauistic  de- 
mocracy. The  Rousseauist,  or,  as  I  should  not  hesi- 
tate to  call  him,  the  pseudo-democrat  (I  am  sorry  I  need 
so  many  "pseudos"  in  describing  our  modern  activities), 
would  eliminate  from  the  norm  the  humanistic  or  aris- 

1  The  appeal  to  the  judgment  of  the  keen-sighted  few,  as  opposed  to 
that  of  the  many,  appears  in  Aristotle,  who  always  assumes  an  ideal 
reader,  whom  he  refers  to  variously  as  6  ffirovdaibs,  6  <f>p6vifju>t,  6  fv<f>vfy.  The 
principle  of  universal  consent  as  applied  to  literature  is  first  clearly  stated 
by  Longinus  (irepi  fyovs,  cap.  vu). 


CONCLUSION  353 

tocratic  element.  He  would  value  a  book,  not  by  its 
appeal  to  the  keen-sighted  few,  but  by  its  immediate 
effect  on  the  average  man.  Tolstoy,  it  will  be  remem- 
bered, defends  an  extreme  form  of  this  fallacy,  the  hu- 
manitarian fallacy  as  we  may  term  it,  in  his  book  on  Art, 
and  concludes  that  the  masterpiece  of  nineteenth-cen- 
tury literature  is  "  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin."  Emerson,  who 
has  been  our  guide  thus  far,  can  be  of  little  service  to 
us  here.  He  had  humanitarian  illusions  of  his  own  — 
illusions  that  he  shared  with  his  whole  generation. 
"  We,"  says  Emerson,  giving  fresh  expression  to  his 
favorite  doctrine  that  man  is  the  measure  of  all  things, 
"  We  are  the  photometers,  we  the  irritable  gold-leaf  and 
tinfoil  that  measure  the  accumulations  of  the  subtle 
element.  We  know  the  authentic  effects  of  the  true  fire 
through  every  one  of  its  million  disguises."  One  is 
naturally  prompted  to  inquire  whom  Emerson  means  by 
this  "  we."  Granting  that  man  is  a  photometer  or 
measure  of  light,  it  is  yet  absurd  to  add,  as  Emerson  at 
times  comes  dangerously  near  doing,  that  this  ideal 
measure  exists  unimpaired  in  the  ordinary  untrained 
individual.  Elsewhere  Emerson  says  of  Goethe :  "  He 
hates  to  be  trifled  with  and  to  repeat  some  old  wife's 
fable  that  has  had  possession  of  men's  faith  these  thou- 
sand years.  I  am  here,  he  would  say,  to  be  the  measure 
and  judge  of  these  things.  Why  should  I  take  them  on 
trust?"  This  may  do  very  well  for  Goethe,  but  when 
the  man  in  the  street  thus  sets  up  to  be  the  measure  of 
all  things,  the  result  is  often  hard  to  distinguish  from 
vulgar  presumption.  The  humanitarian  fallacy  would 


354  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

be  comparatively  harmless  if  it  did  not  fit  in  so  perfectly 
with  a  commercialism  which  finds  its  profit  in  flattering 
the  taste  of  the  average  man,  and  an  impressionism  that 
has  lost  the  restraining  sense  of  tradition  and  encour- 
ages us  to  steep  and  saturate  our  minds  in  the  purely 
contemporaneous.  As  it  is,  these  elements  have  com- 
bined in  a  way  that  is  a  menace  to  all  high  and  severe 
standards  of  taste.  To  use  words  as  disagreeable  as  the 
things  they  describe,  literature  is  in  danger  of  being 
vulgarized  and  commercialized  and  journalized.  There 
are  critics  who  have  founded  a  considerable  reputation 
on  the  relationship  that  exists  between  their  own  medi- 
ocrity and  the  mediocrity  of  their  readers.  Sainte-Beuve 
says  that  in  writing  "  we  should  ask  ourselves  from 
time  to  time  with  our  brows  uplifted  towards  the  hilltops 
and  our  eyes  fixed  on  the  group  of  revered  mortals : 
What  would  they  say  of  us?  "  We  may  contrast  this 
advice  with  the  familiar  story  of  the  American  magazine 
editor  who  told  his  young  contributor  that  there  was  an 
old  lady  out  in  Oshkosh  and  that  he  must  always  have 
her  in  mind  and  be  careful  to  write  nothing  that  would 
not  be  clear  to  her.  It  evidently  makes  a  difference 
whether  one  writes  in  the  ideal  presence  of  the  masters 
or  in  that  of  the  old  lady  in  Oshkosh. 

Plainly  the  humanitarian  fallacy  threatens  to  subvert 
utterly  our  critical  standard,  based  as  this  standard  is  on 
the  judgment  of  the  keen-sighted  few  in  the  present  sup- 
ported by  the  judgment  of  the  keen-sighted  few  in  the 
past  as  embodied  in  the  catena  aurea  of  tradition.  We  also 
have  to  face  the  fact  that  Emerson,  who  has  emphasized 


CONCLUSION  355 

more  happily  perhaps  than  any  other  recent  writer  the 
need  of  selectiveness  in  the  individual  (as,  for  example, 
in  his  poem  "  Days  "),  and  also  the  wisdom  of  the  selec- 
tions embodied  in  tradition,  nevertheless  gave  undue  en- 
couragement to  the  ordinary  man,  to  the  man  who  is 
undisciplined  and  unselective  and  untraditional.  His 
influence  has  in  important  respects  been  undeniably 
dubious.  "Almost  all  the  '  perky '  people  one  knows," 
says  Mr.  Brownell,  "  are  Emersonians."  If  we  are  to 
avoid  misunderstandings  we  need  to  inquire  carefully 
into  the  nature  of  this  "  perkiness,"  and  point  out  why 
it  is  possible  to  cherish  Emerson,  or  at  least  one  side  of 
Emerson,  and  at  the  same  time  look  with  extreme  sus- 
picion on  the  Emersonians. 

In  an  earlier  chapter  I  insisted  on  various  resem- 
blances between  Joubert  and  Emerson,  and  in  the  same 
chapter  contrasted  Joubert  and  Madame  de  Stael  as 
clear-cut  types  respectively  of  the  Platonic  and  Rous- 
seauistic  enthusiast.  The  question  arises  whether  Emer- 
son is,  like  Joubert,  purely  Platonic  in  his  enthusiasm. 
Many  of  his  admirers  would  not  hesitate  to  answer 
affirmatively.  A  whole  book  has  in  fact  recently  been 
written  to  prove  that  Emerson  derives  almost  entirely 
from  Plato.1  On  the  other  hand,  another  writer  declares 
that  Emerson  is  the  most  creditable  disciple  Rousseau 
ever  had.2  As  a  matter  of  fact,  if  many  of  Emerson's 
sayings  have  their  counterpart  in  Joubert,  even  more 
of  these  sayings,  perhaps,  run  parallel  to  Rousseau. 

1  See  J.  S.  Harrison  :  The  Teachers  of  Emerson. 
*  See  Rousseau,  by  Thomas  Davidson,  231. 


356  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Without  attempting  to  impose  our  formulae  too  pedant- 
ically upon  Emerson,  we  may  say  that  we  find  coexist- 
ing in  him  the  psychological  traits  that  exist  separately  in 
Joubert  and  in  Rousseau  (as  well  as  in  Rousseau's  dis- 
ciple, Madame  de  Stael) ;  a  blend  so  curious  as  to  make 
of  Emerson  one  of  the  figures  in  literature  most  difficult 
to  place. 

An  obvious  point  of  contact  between  Emerson  and 
Rousseau  is  the  doctrine  of  self-reliance,  which  is  ex- 
pounded in  so  many  passages  of  the  "  Emile "  and  is 
generally  recognized  as  the  central  doctrine  of  Emer- 
son. But  what  does  Emerson  mean  by  the  self  in  his 
self-reliance  ?  In  his  own  words,  "  what  is  the  aboriginal 
self  on  which  a  universal  reliance  may  be  grounded  ?  " 
And  he  goes  on  to  reply  that  it  is  "  that  source  at  once 
the  essence  of  genius,  of  virtue,  and  of  life  which  we 
call  Spontaneity  or  Instinct.  We  denote  this  primary 
wisdom  as  Intuition,"  etc.  The  derivation  of  this  theory 
of  spontaneity  from  Rousseau  through  various  German 
and  New  England  channels  is  sufficiently  plain.  But 
does  Emerson,  like  Rousseau,  use  the  word  "spon- 
taneity "  and  similar  terms  to  connote  a  pure  process  of 
expansion,  a  triumph  of  impulse  over  outer  barriers 
and  restraints?  Does  he  above  ah"  employ  the  word 
"  intuition  "  Rousseauistically  or  Platonically  ?  At  this 
point  appears  that  strange  mingling  of  elements  in  his 
genius  of  which  I  have  spoken.  He  plainly  has  the 
Platonic  perception  of  unity  with  the  elevation  and 
serenity  that  go  with  it.  At  the  same  time  he  exalts 
and  puts  on  the  same  level  with  this  perception  the 


CONCLUSION  357 

purely  centrifugal  powers  of  personality.  He  quotes 
approvingly  the  Oriental  definition  of  God  as  the  inner 
check  (a  definition  that  would  never  have  occurred  to 
Rousseau),  and  almost  in  the  same  breath  he  speaks  of 
"divine  expansion."  Instinct  is  equally  honored  with 
intuition  and  often  identified  with  it.  One  wonders  at 
times  why  a  human  nature  whose  expansive  instincts 
are  so  divine  needs  any  inner  check,  why  a  God  thus 
defined  might  not  safely  be  reduced  to  the  role  of  the 
gods  of  Epicurus.  Is  there  not  some  principle  of  per- 
versity in  the  human  heart  that  leads  in  an  entirely  dif- 
ferent direction  from  the  Self  on  which  we  may  rely, 
and  which  it  is  the  business  of  this  Self  to  discipline 
and  subdue  ?  "  The  entertainment  of  the  proposition  of 
depravity,"  replies  Emerson,  "  is  the  last  profligacy  and 
profanation." 

Emerson  is  thus  at  one  with  Rousseau  in  denying  in- 
trinsic evil  in  human  nature.  His  main  weakness,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  from  which  all  his  other  weaknesses  derive, 
is  that,  like  Wordsworth  and  so  many  other  Rousseau- 
ists,  he  thus  "  averts  his  ken  from  half  of  human  fate." l 
This  attitude  towards  the  problem  of  perversity  is  so 
contrary  to  the  ascertained  facts,  so  opposed  to  all  hard 
and  clear  and  honest  thinking,  that  it  may  compromise 
gravely  in  the  long  run  the  reputations  of  all  those  who 
have  taken  it.  A  curious  reflection  occurs  at  this  point. 
The  reputation  of  Jonathan  Edwards,  probably  the  most 
original  thinker  America  produced  before  Emerson,  has 

1  This  central  weakness  in  Emerson  and  its  consequences  have  been 
pointed  out  by  Madame  Dugard  in  her  monograph,  and  by  P.  E.  More 
in  Shelburne  Essays,  I,  71  ff. 


358  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

been  gravely  compromised  by  precisely  tbe  opposite  ex- 
cess in  dealing  with  the  problem  of  perversity.  Histori- 
cally Emerson's  denial  of  perversity  merely  marks  the 
extreme  recoil  from  the  Enfield  Discourse  on  "  Sinners 
in  the  Hands  of  an  Angry  God,"  —  from  Edwards' s  use 
of  perversity  to  establish  a  spiritual  reign  of  terror  which 
was  to  serve  in  turn  to  prop  and  buttress  a  tottering 
theology.  Edwards,  however,  in  his  dealings  with  sin 
and  its  reality  is  only  exaggerating  the  facts,  exagger- 
ating them  it  must  be  granted  with  an  almost  maniacal 
insistency,  whereas  Emerson  and  the  Rousseauists  are 
simply  repudiating  the  facts.  Possibly  that  is  one  reason 
for  the  contrast  between  the  tremendous  logical  grip  of 
Edwards  and  the  dialectical  feebleness  of  Emerson. 

It  is  doubtful  whether  any  one  who  is  so  weak  in  di- 
alectic as  Emerson  may  properly  be  called  a  Platonist  at 
all.  We  can  imagine  how  Socrates  would  have  pursued 
Emerson  in  one  of  Plato's  dialogues,  exacting  from  him 
sharp  and  discriminating  definitions  and  multiplying 
distinctions  about  words  like  "  nature  "  and  "  instinct," 
which  Emerson,  as  it  is,  employs  so  vaguely.  He  is  not 
merely  deficient  in  the  more  obvious  technique  of  think- 
ing, a  deficiency  that  has  led  many  of  the  professional 
philosophers  to  refuse  him  recognition  entirely,  but  he 
lacks  that  more  essential  consistency  which  would  have 
enabled  him  to  knit  together  the  two  main  aspects  of 
his  work  —  on  £He  one  hand,  the  insistence  on  the  unique 
and  the  individual  which  he  possessed  in  common  with 
his  century,  and  on  the  other,  the  spiritual  concentra- 
tion and  perception  of  unity  which  he  possessed  in  com- 


CONCLUSION  359 

mon  with  the  seers  of  all  centuries.  A  serious  thinker 
should  not,  according  to  Joubert,  put  forth  a  truth  with- 
out at  the  same  time  putting  forth  the  counter-truth 
that  corrects  and  conditions  it;  otherwise  the  truth  will 
cease  to  be  wholesome  and  become  an  intoxicant.  Now 
Emerson,  as  a  rule,  supplies  both  the  truth  and  the 
counter-truth,  but  the  two  not  being  linked  together  by 
vital  dialectic,  as  they  would  ordinarily  be  by  a  thinker  of 
his  class,  it  has  been  possible  for  his  followers  to  take 
the  intoxicant  and  leave  the  corrective.  An  "  ideal "  one 
might  suppose  that  carries  with  it  no  discipline  or  obli- 
gation is  not  worth  a  straw,  but  it  has  been  possible  to 
extract  from  Emerson  something  that  passes  for  ideal- 
ism and  is  not  disciplinary  at  all,  but  merely  a  vague  op- 
timistic exaltation.  Instead  of  seeking  to  ascertain  the 
laws  of  nature  and  human  nature  and  then  striving  to 
adjust  ourselves  to  them,  we  are  filled  under  Emerson's 
influence  and  in  his  own  phrase  with  "  the  delicious  sense 
of  indeterminate  size  "  and  become  "  elastic  as  the  gas 
of  gunpowder."  We  are,  in  short,  encouraged  to  be- 
lieve that  the  stern  realities  of  sin  and  suffering  may  be 
charmed  away  by  a  sort  of  emotional  intoxication.  This 
side  of  Emerson  is  plainly  related  on  the  one  hand  to 
Rousseau,  and  on  the  other  to  that  most  dubious  aspect 
of  our  American  national  temper  which  finds  its  extreme 
expression  in  Christian  Science.  "  Man  is  good  and  na- 
ture is  beautiful,"  says  Rousseau  in  substance.  "  I  am 
lovely  and  the  world  is  lovely,  too,"  is  a  recent  formu- 
lation of  the  creed  of  the  Christian  Scientist. 

This  Rousseauistic  side  of  Emerson  not  only  obscures 


360  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

the  struggle  between  good  and  evil  in  the  individual,  it 
also  obscures  the  need  of  culture,  the  aid  the  individual 
may  derive  in  solving  his  problems  from  society  and,  in 
general,  from  the  experience  of  other  men  both  in  the 
present  and  in  the  past.  If  the  times  suffer  from  squalid 
mediocrity,  as  Emerson  assures  us  they  do,  the  difficulty 
must  be  that  the  individual  does  not  show  sufficient  con- 
fidence in  opposing  to  this  mediocrity  his  own  infallible 
intuitions.  Emerson  never  tires  of  insisting  on  the  hor- 
rors of  conformity.  As  manifested  in  the  English  Church, 
for  example,  it  "  glazes  the  eye,  bloats  the  flesh,  and 
gives  the  voice  a  stertorous  clang."  A  certain  type  of 
Emersonian  suggests  to  us  rather  the  horrors  of  non- 
conformity. The  examples  are  only  too  numerous  of 
persons  who  in  exclusive  reliance  on  the  inner  oracle 
have  thought  themselves  inspired  when  they  were  only 
peculiar.  In  the  end,  it  is  true,  a  man  must  walk  by  his 
own  light,  but  one  would  never  gather  from  Emerson 
how  terribly  difficult  it  is  to  make  sure  first  that  this 
light  is  not  darkness.  In  his  essay  on  "  Quotation  and 
Originality  "  Emerson  dilates  on  how  little  the  individ- 
ual amounts  to  after  all,  and  how  the  best  he  can  do  is 
to  quote  and  imitate ;  and  the  individual  is  in  a  fair  way 
to  become  humble  and  conscious  of  the  danger,  as  Burke 
would  put  it,  of  trading  on  his  own  private  capital  of 
wit.  But  then  Emerson  adds,  "to  all  that  can  be  said  of 
the  preponderance  of  the  Past  the  simple  word  Genius 
is  a  sufficient  reply.  .  .  .  Genius  believes  its  faintest 
presentiment  against  the  testimony  of  all  history."  At 
this  reassuring  utterance  the  individual  is  in  a  fair  way 


CONCLUSION  361 

to  lose  his  incipient  humility  and  become  once  more  as 
elastic  as  the  gas  of  gunpowder.  With  such  an  inner 
oracle  to  rely  on,  why  go  through  the  severe  effort  of 
building  up  standards  based  on  the  assimilation  of  tra- 
dition ? 

Pascal  would  have  said  that  Emerson's  sense  of  man's 
grandeur  was  not  sufficiently  tempered  by  a  sense  of 
man's  wretchedness.  "  The  single  man,"  according  to 
Emerson,  must  "  plant  himself  indomitably  upon  his  in- 
stincts." A  Chicago  physician  recently  declared  that  the 
average  man  has  the  murder  "  instinct " ;  and  if  we  are 
to  trust  statistics  an  increasing  number  of  Americans 
are  planting  themselves  upon  it  very  indomitably.  I  am 
not  trying,  however,  to  establish  a  connection  between 
Emersonianism  and  murder.  The  worst  that  is  likely  to 
befall  the  man  who  plants  himself  indomitably  upon  his 
own  instincts  is  that  he  will  plant  himself  indomitably 
upon  his  own  crudity.  "  The  affirmative  principle  of  the 
recent  philosophy,"  Emerson  declares,  "  is  trust  in  the 
private,  self-supplied  powers  of  the  individual."  "  As 
though,"  says  Goethe,  who  had  seen  the  beginnings  of 
the  philosophy  to  which  Emerson  refers,  the  philosophy 
of  original  genius,  and  had  almost  been  the  victim  of  it, 
"  as  though  a  man  gets  anything  from  himself  except 
his  own  awkwardness  and  stupidity." 

Emerson,  then,  is  a  wise  man  whose  influence  often 
works  against  that  humility  which  is  the  first  mark  of 
wisdom  ;  a  true  sage  who  must  yet  be  numbered  among 
the  sycophants  of  human  nature ;  a  somewhat  baffling 
blend,  as  I  have  already  said,  of  Rousseauism  and  insight ; 


362  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

impressing  us  at  times  as  a  truly  religious  spirit,  a  spirit 
living,  as  a  theologian  would  say,  in  a  state  of  grace, 
and  at  times  reminding  us  only  too  strongly  of  that 
Rousseauistic  caricature  of  the  religious  spirit,  the  "  beau- 
tiful soul."  But  light,  as  Arnold  remarks,  is  rare  and 
must  be  treasured  wherever  found :  we  must,  therefore, 
treasure  it  in  Emerson,  though  often  associated  with  an 
impossible  optimism,  just  as  we  must  treasure  it  in  Jona- 
than Edwards,  though  associated  with  an  impossible 
theology.  The  oversoul  that  Emerson  perceives  in  his 
best  moments  is  the  true  oversoul  and  not  the  undersold 
that  the  Rousseauist  sets  up  as  a  substitute.  He  can 
therefore  supply  elements  that  will  help  us  in  forming 
our  critical  standard.  I  have  tried,  however,  to  make 
clear  that  our  use  of  these  elements,  if  it  is  not  to  be 
misleading,  must  be  hedged  about  with  the  sharp  dis- 
tinctions of  which  he  was  himself  so  sparing. 

in 

What  we  are  seeking  is  a  critic  who  rests  his  dis- 
cipline and  selection  upon  the  past  without  being  a 
mere  traditionalist ;  whose  holding  of  tradition  involves 
a  constant  process  of  hard  and  clear  thinking,  a  con- 
stant adjustment,  in  other  words,  of  the  experience  of 
the  past  to  the  changing  needs  of  the  present. 

Who  are  to  be  our  models  for  this  right  critical  in- 
terpretation of  the  past?  They  are  curiously  hard  to 
find  in  the  nineteenth  century,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that 
it  is  commonly  supposed  to  be  the  most  historical  of 
centuries.  There  prevailed  during  this  period  two  main 


CONCLUSION  363 

attitudes  towards  the  past  which  may  be  defined,  re- 
spectively, as  the  scientific  and  the  romantic.  The  man 
with  the  scientific  attitude  is  chiefly  concerned  with 
investigating  and  establishing  the  facts  of  the  past. 
The  romanticist,  for  his  part,  revels  in  the  mere  pictur-' 
esqueness  of  the  facts  or  else  takes  refuge  in  the  past 
from  the  present,  uses  it,  as  Taine  would  say,  to  create 
for  himself  an  alibi.  But  the  past  should  be  regarded 
primarily  neither  as  a  laboratory  for  research  nor  as  a 
bower  of  dreams,  but  as  a  school  of  experience.  Where, 
then,  is  the  man  who  has  been  fully  initiated  into  tra- 
dition, and  at  the  same  time  knows  how  to  bring  it  to 
bear  upon  the  present  ?  Even  Sainte-Beuve  does  not 
fully  satisfy  us  here.  He  was  one  of  the  victims  of  that 
naturalistic  fatalism  that  has  lain  like  a  blight  upon  the 
human  spirit  for  the  past  fifty  years  or  more.  "  Man," 
he  says,  "has  the  illusion  of  liberty."  What  is  the  use 
of  knowing  the  past  if  one  is  not  free  to  profit  by  the 
knowledge  ?  We  think  by  contrast  of  Goethe  (whom 
Sainte-Beuve  himself  calls  the  king  of  critics),  and  of 
Goethe's  saying  that  the  chief  benefit  one  may  derive 
from  a  total  study  of  his  work  is  a  "  certain  inner 
freedom." 

Goethe,  indeed,  comes  nearer  than  any  other  modern 
to  what  we  are  seeking ;  not  the  romantic  or  scientific 
Goethe,  it  should  be  added,  but  the  humanistic  Goethe, 
who  is  revealed  in  the  conversations  with  Eckermann 
and  others,  and  in  the  critical  utterances  of  his  later 
years.  As  an  actual  practitioner  of  the  art  of  criticism, 
he  seems  to  me  inferior  to  the  best  of  the  Frenchmen ; 


364  MODERN  FRENCH   CRITICISM 

but  as  an  initiator  into  the  critical  habit  of  mind  he  is 
incomparable.  He  has,  as  Sainte-Beuve  puts  it,  assim- 
ilated not  merely  tradition,  but  all  traditions,  and  that 
without  ceasing  to  be  a  modern  of  moderns ;  he  keeps 
watch  for  every  new  sail  on  the  horizon,  but  from  the 
height  of  a  Sunium.  He  would  use  the  larger  back- 
ground and  perspective  to  round  out  and  support  his 
individual  insight  and  so  make  of  the  present  what  it 
should  be  —  not  the  servile  imitation,  nor  again  the 
blank  denial  of  the  past,  but  its  creative  continuation. 
"  To  the  errors  and  aberrations  of  the  hour,"  he  says, 
"  we  must  oppose  the  masses  of  universal  history."  He 
would  have  us  cease  theorizing  about  the  absolute  and 
learn  to  recognize  it  in  its  actual  manifestations.  This 
particular  form  of  the  humanistic  art  of  seeing  the  One 
in  the  Many  would  seem  especially  appropriate  to  an  age 
like  ours  that  differs  above  all  from  other  ages,  Greek 
and  Roman  antiquity,  for  example,  in  having  at  its  com- 
mand a  vaster  body  of  verified  human  experience. 

I  have  said  that  the  humanistic  rather  than  the  Rous- 
seauistic  Goethe  is  important  for  our  purpose.  But 
I  should  add  that  the  process  by  which  he  passes 
from  the  Rousseauistic  to  the  humanistic  attitude  is 
almost  as  instructive  as  the  final  result.  The  complete- 
ness of  his  reaction  from  the  Rousseauistic  theory  of 
spontaneity  or  original  genius,  of  which  he  was  at  the 
beginning  the  chief  German  exponent,  may  be  inferred 
from  a  sentence  I  have  already  quoted.  He  did  not  go 
on,  like  Emerson,  cultivating  the  delicious  sense  of  inde- 
terminate size,  and  feeling  as  elastic  as  the  gas  of  gun- 


CONCLUSION  365 

powder ;  he  was  not  permanently  satisfied,  in  short,  with 
romantic  megalomania ;  he  discovered  that  man  pro-  / 
gresses  by  taking  on  limitations  and  not,  as  the  Rous- 
seauist  would  have  us  believe,  by  throwing  them  off. 
The  lesson  of  "  Wilhelm  Meister,"  as  of  so  much  of  his 
later  writing,  is  that  the  individual  must  submit  his 
temperament  and  impulses  to  something  higher  than 
themselves  —  in  other  words,  he  must  renounce.  The 
process  of  constant  dying  to  one's  self,  that  Goethe 
proclaims  (stirb  und  werde),  falls  in,  of  course,  with 
much  that  is  most  profound  in  religion ;  but  Goethe's 
renunciation,  it  should  be  observed,  is  entirely  unascetic. 
It  seems  the  natural  outgrowth  of  the  experience  of  this 
life  and  not,  as  so  often  in  religion,  the  violent  contra- 
diction of  it. 

What  Goethe  himself  renounced  was  the  world  of 
Rousseauistic  revery.  He  turned  more  and  more  from 
dreaming  to  doing.  A  man  must,  he  says,  combining 
the  terminology  of  Leibnitz  with  that  of  Aristotle,  raise 
himself  by  constant  striving  from  a  mere  monad  to  an 
entelechy.  Only  in  this  way  may  he  hope  for  happiness 
in  this  world  and  continuance  in  the  next.  We  may  take, 
as  best  summing  up  the  central  thought  of  Goethe,  the 
lines  at  the  end  of  the  Second  Faust  in  which  the  angels 
proclaim  salvation  by  works :  — 

"  Wer  immer  strebend  sich  bemilht. 
Den  konnen  wir  erlOsen." 

Yet  it  is  just  here  in  connection  with  this  doctrine 
of  works,  especially  as  exemplified  in  the  Second  Faust, 
that  our  first  doubts  about  Goethe  arise.  I  have  quoted 


366  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

Goethe  against  Emerson.  It  is  only  fair  to  quote  Emer- 
son in  return  upon  the  limitations  of  Goethe.  After 
praising  Goethe  heartily  in  his  "  Representative  Men," 
he  yet  ends  by  saying  that  he  did  not  worship  the  highest 
unity.  So  far  as  this  judgment  merely  reflects  the  Rous- 
seauistic  side  of  Emerson,  his  suspicion  of  culture  and 
his  dislike  of  analysis,  it  is  negligible.  But  Emerson  was 
not  only  a  Rousseauist  but  a  seer,  and  his  insight  as 
well  as  his  Rousseauism  appears,  as  it  seems  to  me,  in 
the  dictum  that  Goethe  did  not  worship  the  highest 
unity. 

Now  to  say  of  Goethe  that  he  did  not  worship  the 
highest  unity  is  simply  another  way  of  saying  that  he 
lacked  religious  elevation.  In  any  case  he  is  less  open 
than  most  men  of  the  last  century  to  the  charge  of  con- 
fusing the  planes  of  being.  He  kept  his  outlook  open 
and  unobstructed  by  scientific  or  other  dogmatism  even 
on  the  religious  plane.  He  purged  and  purified  himself 
very  completely  of  the  pseudo-spirituality  of  the  Rous- 
seauist,—  of  that  shrinking  back  from  outer  reality 
coupled  with  that  giddy  gazing  into  the  bottomless  pit 
of  the  "  heart "  against  which  he  utters  a  warning  in 
his  "  Tasso."  l  He  escaped  in  short  from  the  world  of 
romantic  dreaming  that  is  within  us.  We  have  it,  how- 
ever, on  rather  high  authority  that  the  kingdom  of  heaven 
is  also  within.  Even  in  the  inner  life  itself,  it  would  ap- 

1  "  Es  liegt  um  uns  herum 

Gar  mancher  Abgrund,  den  das  Schicksal  grab  ; 
Doch  hier  in  unserm  Ilerzen  ist  der  tiefste, 
Und  reizend  1st  es,  sich  binab  zu  stiirzen." 


CONCLUSION  367 

pear,  there  may  be  a  choice  of  direction,  a  parting  of  the 
ways.  Goethe  would  not  have  hesitated  to  reply  that  he 
had  aimed  to  escape,  not  only  from  the  romantic,  but  also 
from  the  Christian  morbidness.  I  have  quoted  Sainte- 
Beuve's  saying  that  Goethe  had  assimilated,  not  merely 
tradition,  but  all  traditions.  How  about  the  tradition  that 
goes  back  to  Judaea  ?  The  reply  is  by  no  means  simple. 
We  remember  the  impressive  tribute  he  paid  to  Christ- 
ianity1 only  a  few  weeks  before  his  death,  but  then  he 
also  retained  his  early  conviction  that  Pascal  had  done 
more  harm  to  religion  than  all  the  deists  and  atheists 
of  the  eighteenth  century.  Now  Pascal  paints,  though 
in  somewhat  less  lurid  hues,  the  same  picture  of  human 
destiny  as  Jonathan  Edwards :  on  the  one  hand,  God  in 
his  absolute  and  arbitrary  sovereignty;  on  the  other, 
man  weltering  helplessly  in  his  sin  ;  the  interval  between 
only  to  be  traversed  by  "  thunderclaps  and  visible  upsets 
of  grace."  This  somewhat  melodramatic  form  of  Christ- 
ianity, the  tremendous  spiritual  romanticism  of  Saint 
Augustine,  was  undoubtedly  distasteful  to  Goethe.  As 
against  this  type  of  inwardness  with  its  ascetic  impli- 
cations, he  was  for  reconciling  the  flesh  and  the  spirit, 
or  as  his  detractors  would  say,  for  becoming  a  pagan. 
He  had  at  least  the  advantage  of  being  in  accord  in  his 
attitude  towards  Augustinian  Christianity  with  the  main 
trend  of  the  modern  spirit.  It  would  take  almost  unim- 
aginable disasters  to  induce  the  world  to  give  up  its 

1  Conversation  with  Eckermann,  11  March,  1832.  For  the  more  im- 
portant passages  bearing  on  Goethe's  religious  opinions  see  Otto  Harnack  : 
Goethe  in  der  Epoche  seiner  Vollendung,  50-90. 


368  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

hard-won  reconciliation  of  flesh  and  spirit,  and  once 
more  go  into  sackcloth  and  ashes. 

Goethe  was,  however,  too  great  to  deny  entirely  the 
truths  of  grace,  or  to  lack  the  sense  of  man's  helplessness 
in  the  hands  of  a  higher  power.  He  was  capable  of  the 
obeisance  of  the  spirit  before  this  power  and  knew  that 
if  a  man  is  not  to  remain  a  mere  Titan  his  works  must 
receive  its  blessing.1  Yet  he  would  have  man  dwell  on 
works  and  the  feasibility  of  works,  and  not  on  what  is 
at  bottom  an  insoluble  mystery.  No  inconsiderable  part 
of  wisdom  consists  in  just  this  :  not  to  allow  the  mind 
to  dwell  on  questions  that  are  unprofitable  in  themselves 
or  else  entirely  beyond  its  grasp. 

I  may  myself  seem  to  be  straying  at  present  into  re- 
gions rather  remote  from  my  topic  and  therefore  unpro- 
fitable. My  reply  is  that  the  chief  problem  of  criticism, 
namely,  the  search  for  standards  to  oppose  to  individual 
caprice,  is  also  the  chief  problem  of  contemporary 
thought  in  general :  so  that  any  solution  which  does  not 
get  back  to  first  principles  will  be  worthless.  If  in  a 
book  on  French  criticism,  again,  I  am  devoting  so  much 
space  to  Emerson  and  Goethe,  my  purpose  is  to  empha- 
size in  this  way  my  belief  that  this  problem  of  discipline 
and  standards  is  not  to  be  solved  in  terms  of  French 
life  alone,  as  a  whole  school  of  contemporary  French 
thinkers2  incline  to  believe,  but  is  international.  Finally, 

1  "  Gross  beginnet  Ihr  Titanen,  aber  leiten 
Zu  dem  ewig  Guten,  ewig  Schonen, 
1st  der  Gotter  Werk  ;  die  lasst  gewahren  !  —  " 

2  The  so-called  nationalists  —  Paul  Bourget,  Maurice  Barres,  Charles 
Maurras,  etc. 


CONCLUSION  369 

if  my  discussion  of  grace  and  good  works  seems  to  some 
to  have  an  old-fashioned  flavor,  I  would  reply  with 
Sainte-Beuve  that  simple  psychological  analysis  when 
carried  to  a  certain  point  encounters  in  other  terms  the 
same  questions  as  theology.  Both  in  a  man's  native 
gift  as  well  as  in  the  use  of  this  gift  to  some  adequate 
end  there  is  an  element  of  grace.  In  enumerating  the 
various  explanations  of  this  mystery  that  have  been 
attempted,  Sainte-Beuve  neglected,  as  I  pointed  out,  the 
very  interesting  explanation  embodied  in  the  Oriental 
doctrine  of  karma.  According  to  karma  all  that  large 
part  of  a  man's  life  which  is  so  plainly  independent  of 
his  own  will  and  works  is  simply  the  result  of  his  pre- 
vious works.  This  doctrine  must  affect  its  devotees  very 
differently  from  Augustinian  Christianity,  substituting 
as  it  does  a  strict  causal  nexus  for  the  somewhat  melo- 
dramatic intervention  of  a  divine  bon  plaisir.  Yet  it 
only  puts  the  difficulty  a  few  steps  farther  back;  the 
doctrine  itself,  along  with  the  belief  in  reincarnation 
it  implies,  is  just  as  unthinkable  from  the  platform  of 
the  ordinary  intellect  as  the  doctrine  of  grace.  We  have 
the  testimony  of  Buddha,  the  chief  exponent  of  karma, 
on  this  very  point.  He  puts  it  down  in  his  list  of  the 
four  "  unthinkables." 1  In  him  who  tries  to  grasp  the 
workings  of  this  law2  directly,  he  says,  grievous  and 
vexatious  mental  habits  will  arise,  which  may  even  end 
in  madness.  The  faith  in  karma  is  to  remain  in  solu- 
tion, as  it  were,  in  the  background  of  our  consciousness 

1  See  Anguttara  Nikdya,  Part  n,  sect.  77. 
8  The  Pali  word  is  "  kammavipfiko." 


370  MODERN  FEENCH  CRITICISM 

and  from  there  to  irradiate  our  action.  Our  actual  atten- 
tion should  be  fixed  on  the  step  in  the  "path"  that  is 
just  ahead  of  us.  We  can  infer  what  Buddha  would 
have  thought  of  the  Augustinian1  Christians  who 
would  have  man  turn  away  from  works  and  brood  ever- 
lastingly on  the  mystery  of  grace.  He  would  have  agreed 
with  Holmes  that  the  only  decent  thing  for  a  consistent 
Calvinist  to  do  is  to  go  mad. 

Goethe,  then,  to  return  to  him,  may  simply  have 
showed  his  supreme  good  sense,  his  instinct  for  a  sound 
spiritual  hygiene,  in  turning  away  from  grace  to  works. 
He  established  his  own  list  of  "  unthinkables,"  which 
is  not  so  different  from  that  of  Buddha  as  one  might 
suppose.  We  may  note,  for  example,  that  both  men  dis- 
missed as  unprofitable  speculations  about  personal  im- 
mortality.2 How  many  other  questions  there  are  that 
professional  philosophers  are  fond  of  discussing  and  that 
may  be  profitably  dismissed  either  because  they  are  in- 
soluble in  themselves  or  because  they  do  not,  in  Buddha's 
phrase,  "make  for  edification  "  !  Men  do  not  fail,  Goethe 
insisted,  so  much  from  lack  of  light  on  ultimate  problems 
as  from  neglect  of  the  very  obvious  and  often  very 
humble  duty  which  is  immediately  before  them ;  from  not 
having  met,  as  he  puts  it,  the  demands  of  the  day  (die 
Forderung  des  Tages).  In  thus  looking  to  immediate 
practice  Goethe  is  at  one  with  Dr.  Johnson,  the  fit 

1  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  St.  Augustine  did  not  put  great  emphasis 
on  works,  but  merely  that  the  side  of  Christianity  which  shows  most  clearly 
his  influence  has  put  an  even  greater  emphasis  on  grace. 

2  For  Goethe's  admirable  utterances  on  this  subject  see  Eckermann, 
24  February,  1824. 


CONCLUSION  371 

representative  of  a  race  that  has  shown  a  genius  for 
conduct.  All  theory,  says  Johnson,  makes  against  the 
freedom  of  the  will  and  all  experience  in  favor  of  it  — 
the  happiest  utterance  on  this  subject  with  which  I  am 
familiar.  Like  Goethe,  Johnson  simply  refused,  therefore, 
at  the  outset  to  enter  into  the  metaphysical  maze  of 
either  the  dogmatic  supernaturalist  or  the  dogmatic 
naturalist.  For  the  method  of  approach  to  the  problem 
of  a  dogmatic  naturalist  like  Taine  involves,  no  less 
than  that  of  the  dogmatic  supernaturalist,  an  attempt  to 
think  the  unthinkable  (as  Buddha  also  pointed  out).1 
Both  the  One  and  the  Many  as  well  as  man's  relation 
to  them  must  forever  elude  final  formulation. 

Why,  then,  should  we  feel  any  doubt  about  Goethe's 
doctrine  of  work  ?  The  reply  is  that  in  his  reaction 
from  the  romantic  morbidness  and  what  seemed  to  him 
the  Christian  morbidness  he  has  transferred  his  work 
too  much  from  the  inner  life  of  the  individual  to  the 
outer  world.  This  point  may  be  made  clear  by  com- 
paring him  with  the  great  ancient  of  whom  he  is  in 
some  respects  the  disciple  —  Aristotle.  For  no  one  I 
presume,  would  deny  that  Goethe  is  in  his  general 
temper  far  more  Aristotelian  than  Platonic.  Now  if 
Plato  anticipates  on  one  side  of  his  thinking  the  doc- 
trine of  grace,  as  when  he  says  that  virtue  is  "neither 
natural  nor  acquired  but  comes  to  the  virtuous  by  the 
gift  of  God "  ("  Meno "),  Aristotle  goes  steadily  on 

1  In  the  passage  I  have  already  quoted.  The  Pali  word  for  the  attempt 
to  grasp  the  material  world  intellectually  (which  Buddha  deems  impos- 
sible) is  "  lokaciuta." 


372  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

the  assumption  that  virtue  can  be  acquired,  and  is  there- 
fore a  thoroughgoing  partisan  of  works.  The  works 
he  would  have  us  perform,  however,  are  not  primarily 
utilitarian.  He  would  have  us  work  to  redeem  our 
own  lower  self  from  evil  habits,  and  not,  like  Faust, 
to  reclaim  marsh  lands  from  the  sea.  Moreover,  the 
purpose  that  is  imposed  on  the  lower  self  and  by  which 
it  is  disciplined  is  linked  by  a  series  of  intermediary 
purposes  to  the  supreme  and  perfect  End  itself;  in 
other  words,  it  rests  ultimately  on  an  intuition  of  what 
Emerson  calls  the  highest  unity.  Aristotle  is  indeed  less 
habitually  conscious  of  this  unity  than  Plato.  Though 
even  Plato  seems  terribly  "  at  ease  in  Zion  "  to  the  aus- 
tere Christian,  he  has  more  sense  of  man's  helplessness 
before  the  infinite,  more  of  that  humility,  in  short,  that 
the  man  whose  attention  is  turned  too  exclusively  to 
works  is  constantly  in  danger  of  losing. 

But  though  Aristotle  is  less  preoccupied  with  the 
highest  unity  than  Plato,  I  believe  that  he  is  more  pre- 
occupied with  it  than  Goethe.  Though  far  more  than  a 
mere  naturalist,  as  I  have  tried  to  show,  Goethe,  in  the 
last  analysis,  conceives  of  life  more  naturalistically, 
that  is  more  expansively,  than  Aristotle.  He  was 
born  into  an  enormously  expansive  age  and  was  drawn 
into  its  main  current.  He  found  in  the  First  Faust 
the  happiest  formulae  for  the  two  main  forces  that 
were  to  dominate  this  age  —  scientific  positivism  (Im 
Anfang  war  die  Tat]  and  Rousseauistic  romanticism 
(Gefuhl  1st  alles).  The  Aristotelian  would  object  that 
the  Deed  and  the  Emotion  do  not  by  themselves 


CONCLUSION  373 

suffice,  that  some  adequate  purpose  must  intervene  to 
direct  the  Deed  and  discipline  the  Emotion.  And 
Goethe  himself  became  increasingly  Aristotelian  in  this 
respect  as  he  grew  older.  Yet  even  so,  he  still  con- 
ceives at  the  end  of  the  Second  Faust  of  both  the 
Deed  and  the  Emotion  too  much  in  terms  of  expansion. 
I  have  already  criticised  from  the  Aristotelian  point  of 
view  his  conception  of  the  Deed.  Let  us  consider  for  a 
moment  from  the  same  point  of  view  his  conception  of 
the  Emotion.  As  is  well  known  he  praises  as  the  most 
exalted  form  of  emotion  the  "  eternal  Feminine  "  which 
"  draws  us  upward."  We  are  reminded  here  of  Dante 
—  a  poet  who  will  scarcely  be  accused  of  not  having 
worshipped  the  highest  unity  —  and  his  proclamation 
of  that  "  primal  love  "  that  built  the  walls  of  hell.1 
Dante's  conception  implies  a  degree  of  selectiveness 
that  makes  us  shudder.  But  is  it  not  evident  that  to 
conceive  of  the  highest  love  as  Goethe  did  is  to  go  to 
the  opposite  extreme,  and  eliminate  from  it  the  element 
of  judgment  and  selection  entirely ;  to  forget  that  if  the 
eternal  Feminine  draws  us  upward,  only  the  eternal 
Masculine  can  keep  us  up  ?  The  supreme  love,  we  may 
surmise,  is  not  exclusively  judicial  or  sympathetic,  but 
a  vital  mediation  between  judgment  and  sympathy ;  it 
is  selective  love.  It  belongs  to  that  superrational  plane 
on  which,  in  Goethe's  phrase,  the  indescribable  is 
accomplished : 2  — 

1  Inf.,  m,  v.  6. 
*  "  Das  Unbeschreibliche. 
Hier  1st  es  gethan." 


374  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

We  can  now  begin  to  see  in  what  sense  Emerson  may 
have  been  right  in  saying  that  Goethe  did  not  worship 
the  highest  unity.  His  view  of  life  in  the  Second  Faust 
evidently  tends  to  fly  apart  into  the  two  extremes  with 
which  we  have  been  so  familiar  during  the  past  cen- 
tury —  on  the  one  hand,  the  idea  of  work  conceived 
primarily  in  a  utilitarian  spirit,  and  on  the  other,  diffus- 
ive, unselective  sympathy.  The  supervention  of  the 
highest  unity  would  have  restored  the  work  from  the 
outer  world  to  the  breast  of  the  individual  and  made 
the  sympathy  selective.  We  should  then  have  had  a 
point  of  view  more  humanistic  and  less  humanitarian. 
To  be  sure,  Goethe  had  no  easy  task  in  converting  the 
mere  romantic  adventurer  of  the  First  Part  (der  Un- 
mensch  ohne  Zweck  und  Huh]  into  a  good  humanist  or 
even  into  a  good  humanitarian.  If  we  wish  to  do  full 
justice  to  Goethe  as  a  humanist  we  should  not  therefore 
confine  ourselves  too  strictly  to  Faust. 

The  true  humanist,  that  is  the  man  who  is  sympathet- 
ically selective,  has  his  standard  within  him  —  living, 
flexible,  intuitive.  Aristotle  would  make  such  a  man 
the  arbiter  of  all  questions  of  taste  and  conduct  —  they 
are  to  be  as  he  would  decide.1  A  man  may  thus  belong 
to  the  keen-sighted  few,  Aristotle  admits,  simply  be- 
cause he  is  born  such.2  In  not  trying  to  get  behind  this 
fact,  Aristotle  showed  his  good  sense,  if  to  do  so  would 
have  been  to  run  into  insoluble  mysteries.  As  the  Greek 
poet  says,  there  are  three  classes  of  men,  (1)  those  who 


1  The  ffTouSoioi  is  &ffitfp  KO.VWV  Kal  nfrpof  .    Eih.  me.,  ill,  4,  1133  a  33. 
8  He  is  a  «iM».  Cf.  Eth.  NIC.,  in,  5,  1114  b  6. 


CONCLUSION  375 

have  insight,  (2)  those  who,  lacking  insight  themselves, 
have  yet  the  wit  to  recognize  it  in  others,  and  (3) 
those  who  have  neither  insight  nor  the  wit  to  recog- 
nize it  (and  these  last,  he  adds,  are  the  truly  useless 
men).  The  uncomfortable  fact  about  life  is  that  so  many 
men  belong  to  the  third  class,  that  there  are  so  many 
men  whose  heads,  in  Joubert's  quaint  phrase,  have  no 
skylights  in  them.  Men  may  be  very  eminent  in  other 
ways  and  yet  lack  the  skylights  ;  Taine,  it  seems  to  me, 
lacked  them.  Nor  do  we  escape  from  the  difficulty  by 
putting  our  main  emphasis  with  M.  Bergson,  not  on  the 
spiritual  but  on  the  aesthetic  intuitions.  The  ordinary 
man  can  no  more  by  any  effort  of  his  own  be  as  aes- 
thetically perceptive  as  Keats,  let  us  say,  than  he  can 
be  as  spiritually  perceptive  as  Emerson.  The  undertak- 
ing in  either  case  is  of  the  same  order  as  that  of  adding 
a  cubit  to  one's  stature.  To  be  completely  equipped  for 
criticism  one  should  possess  in  some  measure  both  kinds 
of  perceptiveness. 

We  must  not,  however,  bear  down  too  heavily,  as 
Voltaire  does,  for  example,  in  matters  of  taste,  on  the 
evident  element  of  grace  and  predestination,  for  this  is 
to  neglect  the  truth  of  works ;  still  less  must  we  see  the 
measure  of  all  things  in  the  man  in  the  street,  for  this 
is  to  neglect  the  truths  of  both  grace  and  works ;  least 
of  all  must  we,  like  Tolstoy,  seek  our  literary  and  artis- 
tic norm  in  the  untutored  peasant,  for  this  is  to  set  up 
a  sort  of  inverted  grace  at  the  imminent  risk  of  falling 
into  bedlam  delusion.  The  right  use  of  grace  and  similar 
doctrines  is  to  make  us  humble  and  not  to  make  us 


376  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

morbid  or  discouraged.  With  due  distrust  of  ourselves, 
a  distrust  that  appears  in  our  readiness  to  fortify  our 
insight  by  tradition,  with  full  admission  that  our  works 
must  be  irradiated  and  guided  from  within  and  from 
above  if  they  are  not  to  prove  vain,  we  must  yet  put 
our  prime  emphasis  in  literature,  as  elsewhere,  on  works. 
Now  to  perform  works  in  the  sense  I  have  tried  to  de- 
fine, that  is,  to  feel  in  all  one  does  the  control  of  the 
highest  unity,  means  in  practice  to  select.  All  the 
knowledge  and  sympathy  in  the  world  can  only  prepare 
for  the  supreme,  the  distinctively  human,  act  of  selection. 
We  must  therefore  train  ourselves  to  feel  that  outer 
objects  are,  in  the  phrase  of  Epictetus,  only  the  raw 
material  for  selection,  and  that  it  is  possible  to  select. 
A  great  library,  for  example,  is  an  infinite  potentiality 
of  selection,  ranging  from  Zola  to  Plato.  In  our  attitude 
towards  it,  as  in  our  other  concerns,  we  are  to  appeal 
from  our  moods  of  lazy  self-indulgence  to  our  moods 
of  strenuous  endeavor,  from  Philip  drunk  to  Philip 
sober.  Our  reading  enters  as  one  element  into  that  sum 
of  choices  that  determines  at  last  our  rank  in  the  scale 
of  being.  Here  as  elsewhere,  if  we  neglect  the  oppor- 
tunities that  the  "  hypocritic  Days "  bring  with  them 
as  they  pass  in  their  endless  file,  we  shall  "too  late 
under  their  solemn  fillets  see  the  scorn." 

We  must  select  constantly  and  resolutely,  though 
without  sourness  or  asceticism.  The  romanticists  have 
been  busy  for  a  century  or  more  instilling  into  our 
heads  the  notion  that  to  be  selective  is  to  be  narrow 
and  probably  ill-natured.  We  must  not  select  but  ad- 


CONCLUSION  377 

mire — admire  like  a  brute,  Hugo  would  add.  When 
Gautier  averred  that  if  he  thought  even  one  of  Hugo's 
verses  bad,  he  would  not  confess  the  fact  to  himself  at 
midnight  in  a  dark  cellar  without  a  candle,  he  must 
have  come  near  fulfilling  the  master's  ideal.  Many 
authors  would  no  doubt  like  to  see  criticism  reduced, 
as  a  romantic  dilettante  recently  defined  it,  to  the  "  art 
of  praise."  A  cat  may,  however,  according  to  the  adage, 
be  killed  with  cream ;  and  it  has  become  only  too  evident 
that  criticism  may  be  killed  by  an  excess  of  the  appreci- 
ative temper.  The  true  mark  of  barbarism,  according 
to  Goethe,  is  to  have  no  organ  for  discerning  the  excel- 
lent. One  may  show  that  he  lacks  this  organ  just  as 
surely  by  overpraising  as  by  overblaming.  What  we 
see  in  America  to-day,  for  instance,  is  an  endless  pro- 
cession of  bad  or  mediocre  books,  each  one  saluted  on 
its  way  to  oblivion  by  epithets  that  would  be  deserved 
only  by  a  masterpiece.  We  have,  in  fact,  been  having 
so  many  masterpieces  of  late  that  we  have  almost  ceased 
to  have  any  literature.  The  critic  is  anxious  like  every- 
body else  to  show  that  he  is  overflowing  with  the  milk 
of  human  kindness,  that  he  is,  in  short,  a  "  beautiful 
soul."  Moreover,  in  a  country  where  the  belief  is  held 
that  all  things  will  turn  out  fortunately  if  only  we  feel 
lovely  enough  about  them,  it  is  commercially  profitable 
to  have  a  beautiful  soul.  The  Christian  Scientists,  in- 
deed, may  be  said  to  have  put  the  art  of  feeling  lovely 
on  a  dividend-paying  basis.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
man  who  has  too  many  exclusions  and  disapprovals  will 
fall  under  the  suspicion  of  not  being  an  optimist,  and 


378  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

not  to  pass  as  an  optimist  is  in  many  parts  of  America 
to  be  discredited.  It  is  of  course  better  to  be  a  eupeptic 
than  a  merely  dyspeptic  critic.  From  this  point  of  view 
we  are  better  off  than  New  Zealand  if  we  are  to  believe 
a  recent  New  Zealand  writer,  who,  after  comparing 
American  critics  to  a  "  community  of  monthly  nurses 
cooing  and  cackling  over  a  succession  of  incomparable 
literary  births,"  says  that  in  New  Zealand  the  compar- 
ison suggested  is  that  of  a  "  pack  of  incorrigible  ter- 
riers watching  for  so  many  rats  or  rabbits  to  leave  their 
holes."  But  it  is  not  a  question  of  being  either  eupep- 
tic or  dyspeptic,  but  of  having  standards  and  the  cour- 
age to  apply  them.  One  may,  as  I  have  tried  to  show  in 
the  case  of  Joubert,  be  perfectly  genial  and  good- 
natured,  and  at  the  same  time  extremely  severe  and 
selective. 

The  excess  of  the  sympathetic  and  appreciative  tem- 
per is  of  course  nothing  peculiar  to  America.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  Max  Nordau  cites  certain  German  critics 
as  the  worst  examples  of  the  disease  he  calls  superlativ- 
ism,  by  which  he  means  the  facile  outpour  of  epithets 
pushed  to  the  verge  of  hysteria.  Modern  criticism,  in 
getting  rid  of  formalism  and  in  becoming  comprehen- 
sive and  sympathetic,  has  performed  only  half,  and  that 
the  less  difficult  half,  of  its  task.  The  time  would  seem 
especially  ripe  for  taking  up  the  second  half  of  the 
task  —  that  of  finding  some  new  principle  of  judgment 
and  selection.  Renan  says  that  "  Goethe  embraced  the 
universe  in  the  vast  affirmation  of  love,"1 — which  is 

1  Avenir  de  la  science,  448. 


CONCLUSION  379 

a  somewhat  hyperbolical  way  of  saying  that  he  is  the 
worthy  representative  of  a  great  era  of  expansion.  But 
if  Goethe  were  alive  to-day,  he  might  be  less  concerned 
with  embracing  the  universe  and  more  concerned  with 
maintaining  standards  against  the  nightmare  of  an  un- 
selective  democracy.  We  need  not,  again,  admire  Sainte- 
Beuve  the  less  because  we  cannot  admit,  any  more  than 
in  the  case  of  Goethe,  that  the  total  emphasis  of  his 
criticism  is  just  what  we  need  at  present.  The  genre  in 
his  hands,  as  I  have  tried  to  show,  is  expanding  away 
from  its  centre.  What  seems  desirable  to-day  is  rather 
a  movement  that  shall  work  in  from  the  periphery  of 
criticism  in  knowledge  and  sympathy  to  its  heart  and 
core  in  judgment.  How  peripheral  criticism  became 
during  the  nineteenth  century  may  be  inferred  from 
the  fact  that  Renan,  for  example,  uses  the  word  in  a 
sense  that  is  contrary  to  its  very  etymology. 

What  is  most  needed  just  now  is  not  great  doctors 
of  relativity  like  Renan  and  Sainte-Beuve,  but  rather  a 
critic  who,  without  being  at  all  rigid  or  reactionary,  can 
yet  carry  into  his  work  the  sense  of  standards  that  are 
set  above  individual  caprice  and  the  flux  of  phenomena ; 
who  can,  in  short,  oppose  a  genuine  humanism  to  the 
pseudo-humanism  of  the  pragmatists.  A  critic  of  this 
kind  might  be  counted  on  to  proclaim  a  philosophy,  not 
of  vital  impulse,  like  M.  Bergson,  but  of  vital  unity  and 
vital  restraint  —  restraint  felt  as  an  inner  living  law  and 
not  merely  as  a  dead  and  mechanical  outer  rule.  We 
may  venture  the  paradox  that  criticism  would  derive  less 
benefit  at  present  from  another  Sainte-Beuve  than  from 


380  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

a  second  Boileau,  that  is,  from  a  man  who  should  work 
as  effectively  for  the  right  kind  of  concentration  in  our 
own  day  as  Boileau  did  in  the  seventeenth  century.  No 
sensible  person  would  deny  the  narrowness  of  Boileau's 
range  *  or  defend  the  formalism  that  appears  so  often 
in  his  theory.  But  his  greatness,  as  Sainte-Beuve  him- 
self points  out,  lies  elsewhere  —  in  the  native  tact  and 
almost  infallible  intuition  he  showed  in  his  critical  judg- 
ments.2 All  was  not  veto  and  restriction  in  his  role, 
Sainte-Beuve  goes  on  to  say,  yet  the  restrictive  element 
predominated.  A  modern  Boileau,  if  he  were  to  be  ef- 
fective, would  have  to  take  up  in  himself  the  main  results 
of  the  great  expansion  of  the  last  century,  but  he  would 
be  primarily  concerned,  not  with  embracing  the  universe 
in  the  vast  affirmation  of  love,  but  with  making  keen  and 
crisp  discriminations  between  different  degrees  of  merit 
or  demerit.  He  would  also  feel  in  his  own  way  that 
hatred  with  which  Boileau  said  he  had  been  inspired  from 
the  age  of  fifteen — the  hatred  of  a  stupid  book;  and  he 
would  not  lack  material  on  which  to  exercise  it.  In  other 
words,  the  age  offers  an  opening  for  satire ;  but  it  must 
be  constructive  satire,  satire  that  implies  standards  and 
is  "  purified,"  as  Boileau  claims  of  his  own,  "  by  a  ray 
of  good  sense."  Nothing  could  be  more  inspiriting  than 
some  twentieth-century  equivalent  for  those  first  satires 3 

1  Sainte-Beuve  enumerates  Boileau's  limitations  in  N.  Lundis,  1, 300-02. 

2  See  the  important  passage  on  the  nature  and  role  of  the  critic  Cha- 
teaubriand, n,  114  ff . 

8  Especially  the  ninth  satire  which  has  been  termed  "  a  martyrology  of 
bad  books  and  bad  authors,"  and  which  M.  Lanson  calls  a  "  terrible  and 
admirable  slaughter  of  reputations." 


CONCLUSION  381 

of  Boileau  when  the  bad  authors  went  down  before  his 
epigrams  like  the  suitors  before  the  shafts  of  Odysseus. 

IV 

What  likelihood  is  there  that  we  shall  witness  in  con- 
temporary France  the  rise  of  a  selective  and  humanistic 
criticism  of  the  kind  I  have  just  been  trying  to  define? 
Any  answer  to  this  question  must  of  course  be  pro- 
visional. Perhaps  the  most  interesting  development  of 
recent  years  in  criticism  proper  is  the  anti-romantic 
movement  which  has  found  notable  expression  in  the 
volume  of  Lasserre.1  This  movement  is  open  to  some 
of  the  objections  I  have  brought  against  Brunetiere, 
whose  influence  is,  indeed,  very  visible  in  it.  A  reaction 
against  naturalism  must  take  up  into  itself  all  that  is 
legitimate  in  naturalism,  after  the  fashion  of  Aristotle, 
and  Goethe  at  his  best.  Though  drawing  vital  nutri- 
ment from  tradition,  it  must  not  dream  of  an  impossible 
return  to  the  past.  It  must  not,  in  short,  be  reactionary 
in  the  French  sense.  The  Frenchman  has  a  way,  partly 
as  a  result  of  his  logical  stringency,  of  connecting  the 
literary  problem  with  the  religious  problem  and  then 
running  the  religious  problem  in  turn  into  the  political 
problem.  That  is  why,  let  me  repeat,  I  have  been  dis- 
cussing the  literary  problem  in  this  chapter  in  terms  of 
Emerson  and  Goethe.  I  could  scarcely  have  avoided 
certain  misunderstandings  if  I  had  discussed  it  in  terms 
of  some  Frenchman  (let  us  say,  Joubert).  The  day  much 
to  be  desired  will  doubtless  come  when  it  will  dawn  on 

1  Le  JRomantisme  franfais,  1907. 


382  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

the  ordinary  Frenchman  that  from  the  fact  that  a  man 
is  not  a  Jacobin,  it  does  not  follow  that  he  must  be  a 
Jesuit,  and  that  one  may  cease  to  be  a  clerical  without 
therefore  becoming  an  anti-clerical.  This  day,  however, 
has  not  yet  arrived,  though  there  are  signs  that  it  is  on 
the  way.  It  may  turn  out  that  if  France  is  to  maintain 
her  high  place  in  civilization  she  will  have  to  expel  both 
the  Jesuitical  and  the  Jacobinical  virus  from  her  blood. 
Another  important  French  movement  of  to-day  bear- 
ing directly  on  the  question  of  critical  standards  is  that 
in  philosophy.  M.  Bergson  is,  of  course,  the  most  prom- 
inent internationally  of  the  many  representatives  of  this 
movement.  If  the  main  drift  of  the  movement  is  to 
undermine  scientific  dogmatism,  great  confusion  pre- 
vails as  yet  as  to  what  is  to  be  built  on  its  ruins.  I  have 
made  sufficiently  clear  in  this  volume  my  own  belief 
that  the  philosophy  of  M.  Bergson,  whatever  its  merits 
as  an  attack  on  scholastic  science,  is  on  its  constructive 
side  not  humanistic,  but  at  most  pseudo-humanistic.  It 
is  a  late  birth  of  romanticism,  allied  with  all  that  is 
violent  and  extreme  in  contemporary  life  from  syndical- 
ism to  "  futurist  "  painting.  M.  Bergson's  appeal  to  "  in- 
tuition" in  particular  has  been  hailed  with  delight  by 
romantic  dilettantes  the  world  over.  It  has  confirmed 
them  in  their  existing  belief  that  they  do  not  need  to 
justify  rationally  their  random  impressions,  that  they 
may  go  on  indefinitely  luxuriating  in  a  decadent  aesthet- 
icism.  The  "  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes  "  suggests  that 
M.  Bergson  may  be  a  new  Socrates.  It  is  far  more  evi- 
dent that  he  is  a  new  Protagoras.  His  influence  is  mak- 


CONCLUSION  383 

ing  against  the  establishing  of  standards  of  judgment 
to-day  just  as  the  influence  of  Protagoras  and  the  other 
sophists  made  against  Socrates  and  his  efforts  to  main- 
tain rational  standards  in  ancient  Greece.  Any  attempt 
to  base  judgment  on  the  flux  is  about  as  promising  an 
undertaking  as  to  seek  to  found  a  firm  edifice  on  the 
waves  of  the  sea.1 

Finally  if  we  are  to  understand  the  situation  in  France 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  present  topic  we  must  cast 
a  glance  at  contemporary  education.  What  is  most  ob- 
vious here  is  that  for  a  number  of  years  (especially 
since  the  "  reform  "  of  secondary  education  in  1902),  a 
humanitarian  reaction  has  been  in  progress  against  hu- 
manism. This  French  humanitarian  movement,  like  all 
movements  of  the  kind,  breaks  up  when  analyzed  into 
two  main  aspects :  first,  the  worship  of  the  sovereignty 
of  the  Fact  (Im  Anfang  war  die  Tat),  the  refusal  to 
impose  upon  education  other  than  utilitarian  ends ;  sec- 
ondly, the  cult  of  diffusive  unselective  sympathy.  Hand 
in  hand  with  the  undermining  of  the  humanities  in  favor 
of  scientific  and  utilitarian  subjects  in  the  lycee,  has 
gone  the  exaltation  of  philological  over  literary  schol- 
arship at  the  Sorbonne.  The  old  French  education,  it  is 
asserted,  gave  too  much  encouragement  to  empty  rhe- 
toric ;  and  we  must  recognize  an  element  of  truth  in  this 

1  Some  of  the  most  poisonous  forms  of  impressionism  are  found  among 
certain  contemporary  sociologists.  It  is  easy  to  detect  under  the  scientific 
or  pseudo-scientific  terminology  the  original  Jacobinical  assumption  that 
mere  impulse  becomes  august  when  multiplied  by  a  million  or  by  ten 
million.  For  instance,  a  prominent  French  sociologist  claims  that  the 
Athenian  jury  was  justified  in  condemning  Socrates  to  death,  being  sup- 
ported as  it  was  by  the  ••  social  conscience  "  of  the  time. 


384  MODERN  FRENCH  CRITICISM 

contention.  For  the  humanism  against  which  the  French 
have  been  reacting  is  not  humanism  as  it  might  be, 
but  humanism  as  it  was  established  in  the  lycee  after 
the  Revolution  and  under  the  patronage  of  Napoleon,  a 
humanism  that  derives  largely  in  turn  from  the  some- 
what formalistic  scheme  of  education  worked  out  by  the 
Jesuits. 

Perhaps  the  leader  of  the  new  movement  at  the 
Sorbonne  has  been  M.  Gustave  Lanson.  The  admirable 
qualities  of  his  "  History  of  French  Literature  "  should 
not  blind  us  to  the  fact  that  he  is  a  humanitarian  rather 
than  a  humanist.  He  is  especially  unsound,  it  seems  to 
me,  in  his  solution  of  the  infinitely  delicate  and  im- 
portant problem  as  to  the  right  relationship  between 
literature  and  science.  He  clings  at  present  even  more 
desperately  to  the  Fact  than  he  did  at  the  beginning,  he 
is  even  more  convinced  that  to  impose  a  human  purpose 
on  the  Fact  is  either  to  become  a  reactionary  or  to  be  lost 
in  the  vaguely  subjective.  We  may  apply  Sainte-Beuve's 
method  to  M.  Lanson  and  study  him  in  his  disciples. 
We  see  dissertations  issuing  from  the  laboratory  he  has 
established  at  the  Sorbonne  which  are  immensely  honest 
and  thorough,  but  lacking  in  those  finer  qualities  of 
selection  and  arrangement  that  have  distinguished  the 
best  French  scholarship  in  the  past.  This  unselective 
worship  of  facts  in  literary  study  is  what  the  French  call 
la  fichomanie. 

In  the  meanwhile  a  lively  counter-movement  is  begin- 
ning to  declare  itself,  directed  against  both  the  "  re- 
form "  of  1902  and  the  undue  philologizing  of  the  New 


CONCLUSION  385 

Sorbonne.1  To  those  who  have  accused  him  of  dehu- 
manizing literary  study,  M.  Lanson  has  replied  with 
some  acrimony 2  that  they  are  only  belletristic  dabblers. 
We  have  had  our  own  debates  in  America  between  the 
philologists  and  the  humanists  (or  those  who  imagine 
themselves  such),  but  the  acrimony  has  been  less.  This 
is  partly  because  we  do  not  take  ideas  so  seriously  as  the 
French  (and  herein  we  are  their  inferiors),  partly  be- 
cause we  do  not  mix  the  question  up  in  their  fashion 
with  religion  and  politics  (and  herein  we  are  their 
superiors).  A  man  may  set  up  as  a  humanist  in  this 
country  without  falling  under  any  suspicion  of  being 
a  Jesuit  or  a  partisan  of  monarchical  government.  I 
should  add  that  beside  the  more  theoretical  opposition 
to  the  new  education  there  has  been  visible  of  late  a 
sort  of  insurrection  of  common  sense  against  it,3  and 
the  leaders  of  this  latter  movement  are  making  a  laud- 
able effort  to  keep  it  clear  of  religion  and  politics :  it  is 
much  as  if  the  so-called  "  Amherst  idea  "  in  this  country 
should  spread  and  assume  a  national  significance. 

1  The  most  brilliant  of  the  recent  attacks  on  the  Sorbonne  is  that  by 
Agathon   in  L' Esprit  de  la  Nouvelle  Sorbonne  (3e  ed.,  1911  ;  originally 
published  as  articles  in  L' Opinion,  1910).  The  book  must  be  used  with 
some  caution.   "Agathon  "  is  the  pen-name  of  two  very  young  men  who 
have,  I  understand,  certain  personal  reasons  for  their  animus.  See  also 
P.  Legnay,  La  Sorbonne  (2e  ed.,  1910). 

2  See   for  example  his  reply  to  M.  Ch.  Salomon  in  Revue  du  Mois, 
April,  1911. 

3  The  "  Ligue  pour  la  Culture  Franchise  "  was  organized  in  1911,  and 
counts  in  its  membership  a  majority  of  the  different  sections  of  the  In- 
stitute   (including  the   Academy).    Interesting   information  as  to  the 
progress  of  the  movement  will  be  found  in  the  Bulletin  of  the  M  League  " 
(No.  1,  December,  1911). 


386  MODERN  FKENCH  CRITICISM 

An  insurrection  of  common  sense  is  a  good  thing  so 
far  as  it  goes,  but  I  do  not  believe  that  by  itself  it  will 
prove  sufficient.  An  effective  revival  of  the  humanities 
will  have  to  rest  on  sound  philosophical  foundations, 
and  these  foundations  do  not  at  present  exist.  The 
points  at  issue  between  the  New  Sorbonne  and  its  op- 
ponents are  singularly  complex  and  cannot  be  disposed 
of  by  labelling  one  side  literary  and  the  other  scientific 
or  philological.  We  are  really  helped  very  little  in  get- 
ting at  a  man's  ultimate  position  by  being  told  that  he 
is  "  literary."  The  ancient  sophists  were  also  "  literary," 
in  fact  they  came  out  much  more  strongly  for  literature 
than  Socrates.  The  important  thing  to  know  about  a 
man  is  not  whether  he  thinks  himself  literary,  but 
whether  his  point  of  view  is  Socratic  or  sophistical. 
The  professed  champion  of  literature  may  be  only  a 
Bergsonian  aesthete,  who  would  have  us  get  our  vision 
of  reality  by  "  intuiting  "  the  creative  flux.  M.  Lanson 
is  perfectly  right  in  thinking  that,  as  compared  with 
that  of  many  of  his  opponents,  his  own  position  is  re- 
spectable. These  opponents  are  undisciplined  in  them- 
selves as  well  as  lacking  in  the  discipline  that  comes 
from  the  assimilation  of  tradition ;  whereas  what  M. 
Lanson  has  to  offer  may  be  a  dehumanizing  discipline, 
but  it  is  a  discipline.  What  is  discrediting  pure  liter- 
ature and  literary  study  both  in  France  and  elsewhere  is 
the  intolerable  flabbiness  of  most  of  those  who  claim  to 
represent  it.  A  naturalistic  age,  whatever  it  may  set 
out  to  be,  will  end  by  being  imperialistic ;  and  the  tri- 
umph of  the  scientific  investigator  even  in  the  literary 


CONCLUSION  387 

field  is  only  one  expression  of  the  imperialistic  idea.  It 
is  right  that  those  who  will  not  submit  to  any  other 
discipline  should  at  least  have  to  submit  to  the  disci- 
pline of  the  facts.  The  romantic  dilettante  who  in  order 
to  enter  the  career  of  teaching  is  forced  to  bow  his 
neck  beneath  the  philological  yoke  is  getting  merely 
what  he  needs  and  deserves. 

Still  a  discipline  in  facts  and  in  scientific  and  historic 
method  is  no  equivalent  for  a  true  humanistic  discipline. 
France  in  particular  will  suffer  an  irreparable  loss  if  the 
new  education  results  in  a  loosening  or  severing  of  the 
bond  that  connects  it  with  its  great  humanistic  past.  A 
literal  return  to  this  past  or  to  the  past  in  general  is,  I 
have  said,  out  of  the  question.  We  must  have  standards 
and  select,  but  it  must  be  on  different  principles.  No  poet, 
for  example,  has  treated  the  problem  of  selection,  which 
means  in  practice  the  problem  of  the  freedom  of  the 
will,  more  profoundly  than  Dante.  Yet  Dante  could 
scarcely  have  conceived  of  a  selection  entirely  inde- 
pendent of  two  outer  standards  —  the  Pope  in  matters 
spiritual,  the  Emperor  in  matters  temporal.1  Nowadays 
if  we  have  standards  they  must  be  inner  standards,  and 
therefore,  as  I  have  said,  our  problem  has  more  in  com- 
mon with  the  problem  as  it  presented  itself  to  Socrates 
and  the  sophists.  The  great  effort  of  Socrates,  we  are 
told,  was  to  recover  that  firm  foundation  for  human  life 
which  a  misuse  of  the  new  intellectual  spirit  was  render- 
ing impossible.2  To  the  excessive  mental  suppleness  of 

1  See  especially  his  De  Monarchic. 

8  See  Arnold's  Speech  at  Eton  in  Mixed  Essays. 


388  MODERN  FRENCH   CRITICISM 

the  sophists  there  is  often  added  to-day  an  undue  emo- 
tional pliancy.  If  some  remedy  is  not  found  the  modern 
world  will,  like  the  ancient  Greek  world,  become  the 
prey  of  its  sophists.  It  will  progress,  not  as  our  human- 
itarians would  have  us  believe  towards  "some  far-off 
divine  event,"  but  towards  a  decadent  imperialism.  What 
principle  can  set  bounds  to  all  this  intellectual  and  emo- 
tional expansiveness  ?  In  the  words  of  Cardinal  New- 
man, "What  must  be  the  face-to-face  antagonist  by 
which  to  withstand  and  baffle  the  fierce  energy  of  passion 
and  the  all-corroding,  all-dissolving  energy  of  the  intel- 
lect "  —  what  he  calls  elsewhere  "  the  wild  living  intel- 
lect of  man  "  ?  The  reply  would  seem  to  be  that  this 
face-to-face  antagonist  will  be  found,  if  at  all,  not  in 
a  form  of  authority  which  has  become  impossible  for  so 
many  moderns,  but  in  the  intuition  of  something  at 
least  as  living  as  the  intellect,  which,  in  exact  proportion 
as  it  is  perceived,  imposes,  not  merely  on  the  intellect, 
but  on  man's  whole  being  a  controlling  purpose.  The 
world  has  been  moving  for  some  time  past  towards  an 
entirely  different  order  of  intuitions,  and  in  a  philosophy 
like  that  of  M.  Bergson  the  pace  has  become  headlong. 
I  have,  therefore,  in  my  discussion  of  critical  standards 
put  considerable  emphasis  on  a  thinker  like  Emerson, 
who  has  a  thoroughly  modern  view  of  authority,  in 
some  respects  too  modern  a  view,  as  I  have  tried  to 
show,  and  is  yet  intuitive  of  the  One  rather  than  of  the 
Many. 

In  Emerson's  study  at  Concord,  which  remains  as  at 
the  time  of  his  death,  almost  the  first  object  that  meets 


CONCLUSION  389 

one's  eyes  to  the  right  on  entering  is  a  portrait  of 
Sainte-Beuve.  Emerson  is  said  to  have  looked  on  this 
portrait  as  a  special  treasure.  There  is  scarcely  a  single 
mention  of  Sainte-Beuve  in  Emerson's  writings,  and  it 
is  interesting  to  be  able  to  connect  even  thus  superficially 
men  so  different  as  the  great  doctor  of  relativity  and 
the  philosopher  of  the  oversoul.  The  "  Causeries  du 
Luiidi  "  and  a  book  like  "  Representative  Men  "  are  at 
the  opposite  poles  of  nineteenth-century  criticism ;  yet 
for  this  very  reason  and  in  spite  of  his  humanitarian  il- 
lusions,—  in  spite,  we  may  add,  of  his  curiously  de- 
fective feeling  for  the  formal  side  of  art, — Emerson  is 
the  necessary  corrective  of  Sainte-Beuve,  who  has  in- 
finite breadth  and  flexibility,  but  is  lacking  in  elevation. 
This  lack  of  elevation  in  Sainte-Beuve  is  not  an  acci- 
dental defect,  but,  as  I  have  tried  to  show,  bears  a  di- 
rect relation  to  his  naturalistic  method.  The  inadequacy 
of  naturalism  has  been  even  more  manifest  in  recent 
criticism.  Sainte-Beuve  himself  maintained  some  balance 
between  his  regard  for  traditional  standards  and  his  as- 
piration towards  wider  sympathy  and  knowledge.  This 
balance  has  not  been  preserved  by  his  successors. 
Knowledge  pursued  as  an  end  in  itself  and  unsubordi- 
nated to  any  principle  of  judgment  has  degenerated 
into  the  narrowness  of  the  specialist  or  into  dilettante- 
ism.  A  too  exclusive  emphasis  on  breadth  and  keen- 
ness of  sympathy  has  led  to  the  excesses  of  the  impres- 
sionist. I  have  quoted  Sainte-Beuve's  description  of  the 
critics  of  the  First  Empire  as  the  "  small  change "  of 
Boileau.  If  the  critics  of  to-day  are  to  be  anything 


390  MODERN   FRENCH  CRITICISM 

more  than  the  small  change  of  Sainte-Beuve  —  or 
rather  of  one  side  of  Sainte-Beuve  —  they  need  to  cul- 
tivate, as  a  counterpoise  to  their  use  of  the  historical 
and  biographical  method,  a  feeling  for  absolute  values ; 
in  short,  they  need  to  supplement  Sainte-Beuve  by  what 
is  best  in  a  writer  like  Emerson.  The  point  may  be 
illustrated  by  two  passages,  each  impressive  in  its  own 
way. 

The  first  passage  is  from  the  end  of  "  Port-Royal  " 
where  Sainte-Beuve  is  commenting  on  his  own  efforts 
to  attain  the  truth  :  "  How  little  we  can  do  after  all ! 
How  bounded  is  our  gaze — how  much  it  resembles  a 
pale  torch  lit  up  for  a  moment  in  the  midst  of  a  vast 
night !  And  how  impotent  even  he  feels  who  has  most 
at  heart  the  knowing  of  his  object,  who  has  made  it  his 
dearest  ambition  to  grasp  it,  and  his  greatest  pride  to 
paint  it  —  how  impotent  he  feels  and  how  inferior  to 
his  task  on  the  day  when,  this  task  being  almost  termi- 
nated and  the  result  obtained,  the  intoxication  of  his 
strength  dies  away,  when  the  final  exhaustion  and  inevi- 
table disgust  seize  upon  him,  and  he  perceives  in  his 
turn  that  he  is  only  one  of  the  most  fugitive  of  illu- 
sions in  the  bosom  of  the  infinite  illusion  !  " 

This  sense  of  universal  flux  and  relativity  can  by 
itself  result  only  in  what  I  have  called  elsewhere  a  false 
disillusion,  the  disillusion  of  decadence.  But  there  is 
another  type  of  disillusion  :  the  perception  of  unity  may 
become  so  intense  that  everything  else  seems  unreal 
by  comparison.  To  illustrate  this,  we  may  turn  to  Emer- 
son. "There  is,"  he  says,  "no  chance  and  no  anarchy 


CONCLUSION  391 

in  the  universe.  All  is  system  and  gradation.  Every  god 
is  there  sitting  in  his  sphere.  The  young  mortal  enters 
the  hall  of  the  firmament ;  there  he  is  alone  with  them 
alone,  they  pouring  on  him  benedictions  and  gifts  and 
beckoning  him  up  to  their  thrones.  On  the  instant  and 
incessantly  fall  snowstorms  of  illusions.  He  fancies  him- 
self in  a  vast  crowd  which  sways  this  way  and  that  and 
whose  movements  and  doings  he  must  obey.  .  .  .  Every 
moment  new  changes  and  new  showers  of  deceptions  to 
baffle  and  distract  him.  And  when  by  and  by  for  an 
instant  the  air  clears  and  the  cloud  lifts  for  a  little,  there 
are  the  gods  still  sitting  around  him  on  their  thrones — 
they  alone  with  him  alone." 

In  passages  like  this  Emerson  furnishes  some  hint 
of  how  it  is  possible  to  accept  the  doctrine  of  relativity 
without  loss  of  one's  feeling  for  absolute  values,  and 
without  allowing  one's  self  to  be  devoured  by  the  sense  of 
illusion,  as  Amiel  was  and  Sainte-Beuve  would  have  been 
if  he  had  not  found  a  sort  of  oblivion  in  unremitting 
toil.  So  far  as  Emerson  does  this,  he  aids  criticism  in 
its  search  for  inner  standards  to  take  the  place  of  the 
outer  standards  it  has  lost ;  he  helps  it  to  see  in  the 
present  anarchy  the  potentialities  of  a  higher  order. 
What  we  need,  he  says,  is  a  "  coat  woven  of  elastic 
steel,"  a  critical  canon,  in  short,  that  will  restore  to  its 
rights  the  masculine  judgment  but  without  dogmatic 
narrowness.  With  such  a  canon,  criticism  might  still 
cultivate  the  invaluable  feminine  virtues  —  it  might  be 

O 

comprehensive  and  sympathetic  without  at  the  same  time 
being  invertebrate  and  gelatinous. 


392  MODERN  FKENCH  CRITICISM 

Our  ideal  critic,  then,  would  need  to  combine  the 
breadth  and  versatility  and  sense  of  differences  of  a 
Sainte-Beuve  with  the  elevation  and  insight  and  sense 
of  unity  of  an  Emerson.  It  might  be  prudent  to  add 
of  this  critic  in  particular  what  Emerson  has  said  of 
man  in  general,  that  he  is  a  golden  impossibility.  But 
even  though  the  full  attainment  of  our  standard  should 
prove  impossible,  some  progress  might  at  least  be  made 
towards  tempering  with  judgment  the  all-pervading  im- 
pressionism of  contemporary  literature  and  life. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS 


LIST  OF  CRITICS 

NOTE  :  This  list  makes  no  claim  to  completeness  either  in  the  names  included 
or  in  the  material  given  under  each  name.  I  have,  however,  aimed  to  record 
with  some  fulness  the  works  of  the  more  important  writers  who  are  primarily 
literary  critics,  but  have  in  all  cases  been  sparing  in  my  references  to  books  and 
articles  on  the  authors  I  have  listed.  Those  who  wish  more  information  may 
consult  with  profit  H.  P.  Thieme's  Guide  Bibliographique  de  la  Litterature  fran- 
caise  de  1800  a  1906,  in  spite  of  its  numerous  inaccuracies.  The  fourth  volume 
of  G.  Lanson's  Manuel  bibliographique  de  la  litterature  francaise  moderne,  cover- 
ing the  nineteenth  century,  is,  I  understand,  to  appear  shortly.  Excellent  bib- 
liographical material  will  also  be  found  in  C.  H.  C.  Wright's  History  of  French 
Literature  (1912),  883  ff. 

Albert  (Paul),  1827-1880. 

Lea  poetes  et  la  religion  en  Grece,  1863. — La  poesie,  '68. — La  prose,  '69. — 
Histoire  de  la  litterature  romaine,  2  vols.  '71.  — La  litterature  franchise  des  ori- 
gines  au  XVIIe  siecle,  '72.  — La  litterature  franchise  au  XVII*  siecle,  '73.  — La 
litterature  franchise  au  XVIII'  siecle,  '74.  —  Varietes  morales  et  litteraires,  '79.  — 
Poetes  et  poesies,  '81.  —  Histoire  de  la  litterature  francaise  au  XIX'  siecle,  2 
vols.  (prepared  from  his  notes  by  his  son,  Maurice  Albert),  '82,  '85. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  N.  Lundis,  xn,  1869. 

Amiel  (Henri-Frtderic),  1821-1881. 

Caracteristique  generale  de  Rousseau,  in  J.-J.  Rousseau  juge  par  les  Genevois 
d' aujourd' hui,  1879.  — Fragments  Sun  journal  intime,  precedes  d'une  etude  pav 
Edmond  Scherer,  2  vols.,  '83  (translated  with  introduction  by  Mrs.  Humphry 
Ward,  2  vols.,  '85.) 

See  Bourget,  Nouveaux  essais  de  psychologic  contemporaine,  1885.  —  Berthe 
Vadier,  H.  F.  Amiel ;  '85.  —  Renan,  Feuittes  detachees,  '87.  —  Matthew  Arnold, 
Essays  in  Criticism  (Second  Series),  '88.  —  Scherer,  Etudes  critiques,  '89. 

Ampdre  (Jean- Jacques) ,  1800-1864.  Historian,  etc.  —  Travels  in  Ger- 
many, Norway,  etc.  —  Writes  for  Globe.  —  Professor  of  History  and  French 
Literature  at  College  de  France  from  1833.  —  Elected  to  Academy,  1848. 

De  I'histoire  de  la  poesie,  1830.  — Litterature  et  voyage,  '33.  —  Histoire  litte- 
raire  de  la  France  avant  le  XIIe  siecle,  '40.  —  Histoire  litteraire  de  la  France  sous 
Charlemagne  et  durant  les  Xe-XIe  siecles,  '41.  —  Histoire  de  la  litterature  fran- 
caise au  moyen  Age,  comparee  aux  litteratures  etrangeres,  '41.  —  Ballanche,  3  vols., 
'48.  — La  Grece,  Rome  et  Dante,  '48.  — Litterature,  voyages  et  poesies,  2  vols.,  '50. 
—  Promenade  en  Amerique ;  Etats-Unis,  Cuba,  Mexique,  2  vols.,  '55. — L'histoire 
romaine  a  Rome,  4  vols.,  '65.  — La  science  et  les  lettres  en  Orient,  '65.  —  Melanges 
d'histoire  litteraire  et  de  litterature,  2  vols.,  '67,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  litteraires,  n,  1844;  Portraits  contemporains, 
m,  '46;  Nouveaux  Lundis,  xm,  '68. 

Angellier  (Auguste),  1847-1911.  Poet  and  critic. 

Robert  Burns,  2  vols.,  1893,  etc. 

Aubertin  (Charles),  1825-1908. 

L' esprit  public  au  XVIII'  siecle  (1715-89),  1873.  — Lea  engines  de  la  langut 


396  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

et  de  la  poesie  franchises,  '74.  —  Histoire  de  la  literature  et  de  la  langue  fran- 
caises,  *76-'78.  — L' Eloquence  politique  et  parlementaire  en  France  avant  1789, 
'82.  —  Origines  et  formation  de  la  langue  et  de  la  metrique  franchises,  '82.  — Lea 
chroniqueurs  fr.  au  moyen  Age,  '96.  — La  versification  fr.  et  sea  nouveaux  theoriciens, 
'98,  etc. 

Balzac  (Honore  de),  1799-1850.  —  Balzac's  chief  attempts  as  a  literary 
critic  appeared  in  La  Revue  parisienne,  1840. 

Lettre  aux  ecrivains  fr.  du  XIXe  siecle,  1834.  —  Eludes  critiques  publiees  dans 
la  Chronique  de  Paris,  '36.  —  Code  litteraire,  '56.  —  Fragments  inedits  de  la 
Revue  parisienne,  '70. 

See  Balzac  critique  litteraire,  in  Au  temps  du  romantisme,  par  A.  Seche  et  Jules 
Bertaut,  1909. 

Barante  (Prosper- Brugiere  de),   1782-1866.    Statesman,  historian,  etc. 

—  Translates  Schiller,  1821. 

Tableau  de  la  litt.  fr.  au  XVIIIe  siecle,  1809.  —  Melanges  historiques  et  litte- 
raires,  3  vols.,  '35.  — Etudes  de  litt.  et  dhistoire,  '68.  — Souvenirs  du  baron  de 
Barante,  8  vols.,  '90-1901,  etc. 

See  A.  Michiels,  Histoire  des  idees  litteraires,  1842.  —  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits 
contemporains,  iv,  '43.  —  Brandes,  The  Emigrant  Literature,  '82.  —  A.  France, 
La  vie  litteraire,  iv,  '92. 

Barbey  D'Aurevilly  ( Jules- Amedee),  1808-1889.  Poet,  novelist,  etc.  — 
A  type  of  the  Byronic  dandy  who  survived  into  the  second  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century;  a  master  of  flamboyant  paradox.  His  tone  of  truculent  oppo- 
sition to  the  main  tendencies  of  his  time  is  very  amusing  if  the  reader  does  not 
get  too  much  of  it. 

Les  Miserables  de  V.  Hugo,  1862.  — Les  Jf>  medallions  de  I'Academie,  '63.  — 

—  Goethe  et  Diderot,  '80.  — Le  theatre  contemporain,  3  vols.,  '87-'92.  —  Pensees 
detachees,  '88.  —  Polemiques  d'hier,  '89.  —  Most  of  Barbey's  critical  articles 
have  been  collected  under  the  general  title  Les  (Euvres  et  les  Hommes  du 
XIXe  siecle,  divided  into  three  series,  17  vols.,  1861-'99  (vol.  rx  missing). — 
Critiques  diverses,  1910,  etc. 

See  Bourget,  Etudes  et  portraits,  1889.  —  Tissot,  Evolutions  de  la  critique,  '90. 

—  France,  La  vie  litteraire,  in,  '91.  —  Lemaltre,  Les  contemporains,  iv,  '93.  — 
L.  Gautier,  Portraits  du  XIXe  siecle,  '94.  —  Levallois,  Memoires  d'un  critique, 
'96.  —  Doumic,  Hommes  et  idees,  1903.  —  E.  Grel6,  J.  B.  d'Aurevilly :  same  et 
son  CBUvre,  '04.  —  E.  Seilliere,  Barbey  d'Aurevilly,  '10. 

Bardouz  (Agenor),  1829-1897. 

Notice  sur  la  vie  et  les  ouvrages  d'Andrieux,  1868.  — Etudes  sur  la  fin  du  XVI 1 le 
siecle,  Comtesse  de  Beaumont,  '84.  —  Etudes  sociales  et  litteraires,  Madame  de 
Custine,  '88.  —  Etudes  d'un  autre  temps,  '89.  —  Chateaubriand,  '93.  —  Guizot, 
'94,  etc. 

Barine  (Arvede),  Mme.  Vincens,  1840-1908. 

Portraits  de  femmes,  1887.  —  Essais  et  fantaisies,  88.  —  Princesses  et  grandet 
dames,  '90.  — Bernardin  de  St.-Pierre,  '91.  —  Alfred  de  Mussel,  '93.  — Bour- 
geois et  gens  de  peu,  '94.  —  Nevroses,  '98.  — Louis  XIV  et  la  Grande  Mademoi- 
selle, 1905,  etc. 

Baudelaire  (Charles),  1821-1867. 

Most  of  B.'s  critical  writing  will  be  found  in  Vol.  n  (Curiosites  esthetiqueti) 
and  in  Vol.  in  (L'Art  romantique)  in  the  7-volume  edition  Lemerre  of  1870. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  397 

Beaunier  (Andr6),  1869.   Novelist,  journalist,  critic. 

La  poesie  nouvette,  1902.  —  Eloges,  '09,  etc. 

Bedier  (Joseph),  1864.   Professor  at  the  College  de  France. 

Le  roman  de  Tristan  et  d'Yseult,  traduit  et  restauri  parJ.  Bedier,  1900.  —  Etudes 
critiques,  '03.  — Lea  legendes  epiques,  2  vols.,  '08  (and  numerous  other  studies 
on  the  Middle  Ages). 

Bersot  (Ernest),  1816-1880.  Philosopher  and  moralist. 

La  philosophic  de  Voltaire,  1848.  —  Etudes  sur  la  philosophic  du  XVI IIe 
siecle,  '52.  — Etudes  sur  le  XVIII"  siecle,  2  vols.,  '55.  — Litt.  et  morale,  '61.  — 
Questions  actuelles,  '62. 

Blaze  de  Bury  (Henri),  1813-1888.  Literary  and  musical  critic,  historian, 
etc.  Translator  of  Faust  and  other  works  of  Goethe. 

Les  ecrivains  et  poetes  modernes  de  VAttemagne,  2  vols.,  1846.  — Les  Icrivaina 
modernes  de  I'Allemogne,  '68.  —  Tableaux  romantiques  de  litt.  et  d'art,  '78.  — 
A .  Dumas,  sa  vie,  son  temps,  son  ceuvre,  '85.  —  Mes  etudes  et  mes  souvenirs,  '85.  — 
Goethe  et  Beethoven,  '92,  etc. 

Bir6  (Edmond),  1829-1907.  A  reactionary  critic  who  investigated  the  de- 
tails of  Hugo's  life  with  a  somewhat  malignant  accuracy. 

V.  Hugo  et  la  Restauration,  1869.  —  V.  Hugo  avant  1830,  '83.  —  V.  de  La- 
prade,  sa  vie  et  ses  ceuvres,  '86.  —  Portraits  litteraires,  '88.  —  Causeries  litte- 
raires,  '89.  —  V.  Hugo  apres  1830,  2  vols.,  '91.  —  Portraits  historiques  et  litte- 
raires, '92.  —  V.  Hugo  apres  1852.  L'exil,  les  dernieres  annees  et  la  mart  du  poete, 
'94. — [Histoire  et  litt.,  '95.  —  Honorede  Balzac,  '97.  —  Causeries  historiques,  '97. — 
Nouvettes  causeries  litteraires,  '97.  —  Dernieres  causeries  litteraires  et  historiques, 
'98.  — Etudes  d'histoire  et  de  litt.;  1900.  — La  presse  royaliste  de  1830  a  1852, 
'01. — Les  dernieres  annees  de  Chateaubriand,  '02. — Biographies  contempo- 
raines,  '05.  —  Chateaubriand,  V.  Hugo,  H.  de  Balzac,  '07.  —  Ecrivains  et  soldats, 
2  vols.,  '07.  — M es  souvenirs,  '08.  — Romans  etromanciers  contem porains,  '08,  etc. 

Boissier  (Gaston),  1823-1908.  Professor  of  Latin  Literature  at  the  Col- 
lege de  France;  member  of  the  Academy  from  1876.  Possibly  the  most  gifted 
literary  critic  among  the  Latinists  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

Le  pobte  Attius,  1857. —  Etude  sur  la  vie  et  les  ouvrages  de  M.  T.  Varron,  '61.  — 
Recherches  sur  la  maniere  dont  furent  recueillies  les  lettres  de  Ciceron,  '63.  —  Ci- 
ceron  et  ses  amis,  '65.  —  La  religion  romaine  d'Auguste  aux  Antonins,  2  vols.,  '74. 
—  Li  'opposition  sous  les  Cesars,  '75.  —  Discours  de  reception,  '77.  —  Promenades 
archeologiques ;  Rome  et  PompSe,  '80.  —  Le  musee  de  St.-Germain,  '82.  —  Nou- 
velles  promenades  archeologiques ;  Horace  et  Virgile,  '86.  —  Mme.  de  Sevigne, 
'87.  — La  fin  du  paganisme,  2  vols.,  '91.  — Saint-Simon,  '92.  — L'Afrique  ro- 
maine, '93. —  Tacite,  1903.  — L' Academic  fr.  sous  I'ancien  regime,  '09,  etc. 

Bordeaux  (Henry),  1870.  Novelist  and  critic. 

Villiers  de  I' Isle  Adam,  1891.  — Edouard  Rod,  '93.  — Teodor  de  Wyzewa,  '94. 
— La  vie  et  I'art,  Ames  modernes,  '94.  — Lavieet  I' art,  Sentiments  et  idles  de  ce 
temps,  '97.  —  Les  ecrivains  et  les  moiurs,  ('97-1900) ,  1900.  —  Portraits  de  femmes 
et  d' en/ants,  1900.  —  Les  ecrivains  et  les  mceurs,  (1900-'OS),  '02.  —  Pelerinages 
litteraires,  '06,  etc. 

Bourget  (Paul),  1852.  At  least  as  good  a  critic  as  he  is  novelist.  TheEssais 
de  psychologic  contemporaine  in  particular  are  a  remarkable  record  of  the  spir- 
itual maladies  of  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  by  one  who  has  suf- 
fered from  most  of  them. 


398  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

Ernest  Renan,  1883.  —  Essais  de  psychologic  contemporaine,  '83.  —  Profits 
perdus,  '84.  —  Nouveaux  essais  de  psychologic  contemporaine,  '85.  —  Etudes  et 
portraits,  2  vols.,  '88,  3e  vol.,  1906.  —  Discoura  de  reception,  '95.  — Pages  de 
critique  et  de  doctrine,  '12. 

Brisson  (Adolphe),  1863.  Editor  of  Les  Annales. 

Portraits  intimes,  5  vols.,  1894-1901.  — La  comedie  litteraire,  '95.  —  Pointes 
seches,  '98.  —  Nos  humoristes,  1900.  —  L'envers  de  la  gloire,  1905,  etc. 

Broglie  (le  due  Albert  de),  1821-1901. 

Etudes  morales  et  litteraires,  1853.  —  Nouvelles  etudes  de  litt.  et  de  morale,  '68. 
• —  Malherbe,  '97.  —  Voltaire  avant  et  pendant  la  guerre  de  Sept  Ans,  '98,  etc. 

Brunetiere  (Ferdinand),  1849 — 1906.  —  Unsuccessful  in  examination  for 
Normal  School,  1870.  —  Teaches  at  Pension  Lelarge.  —  Begins  to  write  for 
Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  '75.  —  Maltre  de  conf6rences  at  Normal  School,  '86. 

—  Lectures  at  Odeon,  '91,  etc.  —  Elected  to  Academy,  '93.  —  Editor-in-chief 
of  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  '93.  —  Visits  the  Vatican,  '94.  —  Lectures  in  the 
United  States,  '97.  —  Excites  anger  of  the  "  intellectuels  "  by  his  attitude  in 
the  Dreyfus  affair.  —  Announces  his  conversion  to  Catholicism,  1900.  —  Loses 
his  position  at  Normal  School  and  fails  to  be  elected  Deschanel's  successor  at 
College  de  France. 

Etudes  critiques  sur  I'histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  8  vols.,  1880-1907.  — Le  roman 
naturaliste,  '83.  —  Histoire  et  litt.,  3  vols.,  '84-'86.  — Questions  de  critique,  '89. 

—  L'  evolution  des  genres  dans  I'histoire  de  la  litt.,  i:   Evolution  de  la  critique 
depuis  la  Renaissance  jusqu'a  nos  jours,  '90.  — Nouvelles  questions  de  critique, 
'90.  — Les  epoques  du  theatre  fr.  (1636-1850),  '92.  — Essais  sur  la  litt.  contem- 
poraine, '92.  —  Discours  de  reception,  '94.  —  Devolution  de  la  poisie  lyrique  en 
France  au  XIXe  siecle,  2  vols.,  '94.  — Education  et  instruction,  '95.  — La  sci- 
ence et  la  religion,  '95.  —  Nouveaux  essais  sur  la  litt.  contemporaine,'  95.  — 
L'ideede  patrie,  '96.  — Lamoralitede  la  doctrine  Evolutive,  '96. — La  Renaissance 
de  I'idealisme,  '96.  —  Manuel  de  I'histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  '97.  —  Apres  le  proc&s. 
Reponse  A  quelques  "Intellectuels,"  '98.  — L'art  et  la  morale,  '98.  — Les  ennemis 
de  I'dme  fr.  '99.  — Le  genie  latin,  '99.  — La  nation  et  I'armee,  '99.  —  Discoura 
de  combat,  3  vols.,  1900-'07.  — La  liberte  de  I'enseignement,  '00. —  Discours  aca- 
demiques,  '01.  —  Les  raisons  actuelles  de  croire,  '01.  — Les  motifs  d'esperer,  '02. 

—  V.  Hugo.  Leyons  (prepared,  under  B.'s  editorship,  by  students  of  Normal 
School),  '02.  — Cinq  lettres  sur  E.  Renan,  '03.  — L' action  sociale  du  Christia- 
nisme,  '04.  —  Sur  les  chemins  de  la  croyance,  '04.  —  Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.  class- 
ique  (1515-1830),  vol.  i  (XVI«  siecle),  '05;  vol.  n  (XVII*  siecle),  '12.  —  Varie- 
tes    litteraires,   '05.  —  H.    de  Balzac,   '06.  —  Saint  Vincent  de  Lerins,  '06.  — 
Questions  actuelles,  '07.  — Etudes  sur  leXVIII*  siecle, '11. — Lettres  de  combat, 
'12. 

See  J.  Lemaftre,  Les  Contemporains,  i,  '85;  vi,  '96.  —  Faguet,  Notes  sur  le 
tMdtre  contemporain,  n,  '89;  Propos  litteraires,  n,  '04.  —  Doumic,  Ecrivains 
d'aujourd'hui,  '94.  —  Ed.  Dowden,  New  Studies  in  Literature,  '95.  —  A.  Brisson, 
Portraits  intimes,  n,  '96.  — Albalat,  L'art  d'ecrire,  '96.  —  A.  Darlu,  M.  Brune- 
tiere et  I'individualisme,  '98.  —  Pellissier,  Etudes  de  litt.  et  de  morale,  '05.  —  V. 
Giraud,  F.  Brunetiere,  '07. — G.  Fonsegrive,  Ferdinand  Brunetiere,  '08.  — 
Faguet,  Ferdinand  Brunetiere,  '11. 

Caro  (Edme-Marie),  1826-1887.  Philosopher,  etc.  He  enjoyed  a  vogue  in 
fashionable  circles  that  reacted  injuriously  on  hia  reputation.  He  is  the  original 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  399 

of  Bellac  in  Pailleron's  Le  Monde  oil  Von  s'ennuie.  He  is  nevertheless  a  critic  of 
real  distinction. 

La  philosophic  de  Goethe,  1866.  — Le  peasimisme  au  XIXe  siecle,  '78.  — La 
fin  du  XVI IIe  siede,  2  vols.,  '80.  — George  Sand,  '88.  —  Melanges  et  portraits, 
2  vols.,  '88.  —  Poetes  et  romanciers,  '88.  —  Varieles  litteraires,  '89,  etc. 

See  Brunetiere,  Questions  de  critiques,  1888. 

Cestre  (Charles),  1871.  Professor  at  the  University  of  Bordeaux. 

La  Revolution  fr.  et  les  poetes  anglais,  1906.  — Bernard  Shaw,  '12,  etc. 

Chasles  (V.-  E.-Philartte),  1798-1873.  Spent  seven  years  as  a  young  man 
in  England.  —  One  of  the  editors  of  the  Journal  des  Debats.  —  Professor  at  the 
College  de  France  from  1847. 

Caracteres  et  paysages,  1833.  —  Le  XVIII'  siecle  en  Angleterre,  '46.  —  Etudes 
sur  VEspagne  et  sur  les  influences  de  la  litt.  espagnole  en  France  et  en  Italic,  '47.  — 
Etudes  sur  le  XVIe  siecle  en  France,  '48.  —  Etudes  sur  les  hommes  et  les  m&urs 
au  XIXe  siecle,  '50.  —  Etudes  sur  la  litt.  et  les  mceurs  en  Angleterre  au  XIXe 
siecle,  '50.  —  Etudes  sur  la  litt.  et  les  maeurs  des  Anglo-Americains  au  XIXe 
siecle,  '51.  — Etudes  sur  W.  Shakspeare,  '52.  — Etude  sur  VAttemagne  ancienne 
et  moderne,  '54.  —  Voyages  d'un  critique  ft  trovers  la  vie  et  les  livres,  2  series,  '65- 
'68.1 —  Etudes  contemporaines,  '66.  —  Portraits  contemporains,  '67.  —  Questions 
du  temps  et  problemesd'autrefois,  '67.  —  De  I  Academic  fr.,  de  ses  destinies  et  de 
son  passe,  '68.  —  Encore  sur  les  contemporains,  leurs  ceuvres  et  leurs  mceurs,  '69.  — 
UAretin,  vie  et  'ecrits,  '73.  — L'antiquite,  '75.  — La  psychologic  sociale  des  nou- 
veaux  peuples,  '75.  — Le  moyen  dge,  '76.  —  Memoires,  2  vols.,  '76-'77.  — La 
France,  I'Espagneet  I' Italic  au  XVI Ie  siecle,  '77.  — L' Angleterre  auXVIe  siecle, 
'79,  etc. 

Chateaubriand  (Frangois-Rene,  vicoznte  de),  1768-1848.  His  literary 
opinions  will  be  found  scattered  through  the  Genie  du  Christianisme,  1802  (orig- 
inally had  as  subtitle  Les  Beautes  de  la  religion  chretienne) ;  in  his  Itineraire,  '11 ; 
in  the  essay  Sur  la  litt.  anglaise,  '36 ;  in  the  Memoires  d'outre-tombe,  '49-'50,  and 
the  volume  of  his  collected  works  known  as  Melanges  litteraires ;  finally  in  his 
correspondance  now  in  course  of  publication  (Vol.  i,  1912). 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Chateaubriand  et  son  groupe  litteraire,  2  vols.,  1860.  — 
Scherer,  Etudes,  i,  '63.  —  Brandes,  The  Emigrant  Literature,  '82.  —  Faguet, 
Etudes  sur  le  XIXe  siecle.  —  Brunetiere,  L'enolution  de  la  critique,  '90.  — 
Vogli6,  Heures  d'histoire,  '93.  —  Eire,  Etudes  et  portraits,  '94.  —  Doumic, 
Etudes  sur  la  litt.  fr.,  n,  '98. 

Chenier  (Marie- Joseph) ,  1764-1811. 

Presentation  &  S.  M.  I'Empereur  et  roi  du  rapport  historique  sur  I'etat  et  les 
progres  de  la  litt.,  1808.  —  Tableau  historique  de  Vital  et  des  progres  de  la  litt. 
depuis  1789,  '16.  — Fragments  du  cours  de  litt.  fait  &  VAthenee  de  Paris  en  1806- 
'07,  '18. 

See  A.  Michiels,  Histoire  des  idees  litteraires,  1842. 

Cherbuliez  (Victor),  1829-1899.  Novelist  and  critic. 

A  propos  d  'un  cheval,  ou  Un  checal  de  Phidias,  1860.  —  Etudes  ae  litt.  et  d'art, 
'73.  —  Hommes  et  choses  d'AUemagne,  '77.  —  Hommes  et  chases  du  temps  pre- 
sent, '83.  —  Discours  de  reception,  '88.  —  Profils  etrangers,  '89.  —  L'art  et  la 
nature,  '92.  — L'ideal  romanesque  en  France  de  1610  a  1816,  1912,  etc. 

See  Brunetiere,  Discours  academiques,  '01.  —  Faguet,  Propos  litteraires,  I,  '02. 

Chuquet  (Arthur),  1853.  Professor  at  the  College  de  France;  editor  of 
Revue  critique,  etc. 


400  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

J.-J.  Rousseau,  1893.  —  Etudes  de  lift,  allemande,  2  vols.,  1900-'02.—  Stend- 
hal-Beyle, '02.  — Litt.  allemande,  '09,  etc. 

Cousin  (Victor),  1792-1867.  Philosopher  and  historian.  —  Professor  at  the 
Sorbonne.  —  Course  discontinued  by  the  Government,  1820.  —  Lectures  again 
with  great  success  in  '28.  —  Engages  in  politics  during  July  Monarchy.  — 
Minister  of  Public  Instruction  in  '40,  etc. 

Des  pensees  de  Pascal,  1842  (Etudes  sur  Pascal,  6^"*  Edition,  revues  et  aug- 
mentees,  '57).  — Fragments  litteraires,  '43.  — Jacqueline  Pascal,  '44.  —  Mme. 
de  LongueviUe  pendant  la  Fronde,  La  Jeunesse  de  Mme.  de  Longueville,  2  vols. ,  '53 . 

—  Mme.  de  Sable,  '54.  —  Mme.  de  Hautefort,  La  duchesse  de  Chevreuse,  2  vols., 
'56.  —  Fragments  et  souvenirs  litteraires,  '57.  —  La  societe  fr.  pendant  le  XVIIe 
siecle,  2  vols.,  '58,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  litteraires,  in,  1844.  —  Cuvillier-Fleury,  Etudes 
historiques  et  litteraires,  n,  '54.  —  Taine,  Les  philosophes  fr.  au  XIXe  siecle,  '57.  — 
Renan,  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  '59.  —  Charles  SecrStan,  La  philosophic 
de  V.  Cousin,  '68.  —  Scherer,  Etudes  critiques  sur  la  litt.  contemporaine,  rv,  '73.  — 
Janet,  V.  Cousin  et  son  ceuvre,  '85.  —  Caro,  Philosophic  et  philosophes,  '88.  — 
Barth61emy  St.-Hilaire,  M.  V.  Cousin  et  sa  correspondence,  3  vols.,  '95.  — 
Faguet,  Politiques  et  moralistes  au  XIXe  siecle,  n,  '98. 

Croiset  (Alfred),  1845.  —  Professor  of  Greek  at  the  Sorbonne. 

Xenophon,  son  caractere  et  son  talent,  1873.  — La  Poesie  de  Pindar eet  lea  lois 
du  lyrisme  grec,  '80.  —  Hist,  de  la  litt.  grecque  (in  collaboration  with  his  brother 
Maurice  Croiset),  5  vols.,  *87-'99.  —  Aristophane  et  les  partis  a  Athenes,  '07,  etc. 

Cuvillier-Fleury  (Alfred-Auguste),  1802-1887.  Literary  critic  of  the 
Journal  des  Debats  from  1834.  —  Member  of  Academy  from  '66.  —  A  critic 
of  conservative  taste.  What  he  objected  to  in  the  romanticists  was  "  le 
mat6rialisme  du  style." 

Melanges  de  critique  et  d'histoire,  11  vols.,  1852-'65.  — Etudes  historiques  et 
litteraires,  2  vols.,  '54.  — Nouvelles  etudes  historiques  et  litteraires,  '55.  — Der- 
nier'es  Etudes  historiques  et  litteraires,  2  vols.,  '59. — Historiens,  poetes  et  romanciers, 
2  vols.,  '63. — Etudes  et  portraits,  2  vols.,  '65-'68.  —  Posthumes  et  revenanta, 
'78. — Journal  intime,  1900. 

See  Merlet,  Portraits  d'hier  et  d'aujourd'hui,  '65.  —  A.  France.La  vie  litteraire, 
i,  '88. 

Daunou  (Pierre-Claude-Francois),  1761-1840.  Historian,  etc. 

De  I'influence  de  Boileau  sur  la  litt.  fr.,  1787.  —  Discours  sur  I'etat  des  lettres 
au  XIII*  siecle,  1814.  —  Continues  Histoire  litteraire  de  la  France  and  con- 
tributes many  articles  on  writers  of  12th  and  13th  centuries,  etc. 

Deschamps  (Gaston),  1861. 

La  vie  et  les  limes,  6  vols.,  1894-1904.  —  Marivaux,  '97,  etc. 

Deschanel  (Emile),  1819-1904.  The  paradox  on  the  "romanticism  of  the 
classics  "  that  Deschanel  maintained  through  several  volumes  does  not  seem 
of  much  significance  for  literary  criticism. 

Physiologic  des  Icrivains  et  des  artistes,  ou  essai  de  critique  naturelle,  1864.  — 
Etudes  sur  Aristophane,  '67.  —  A  bdtons  rompus,  varietes  morales  et  litter aires,'Q8. 

—  Almanach  des  conferences  et  de  la  litt.,  '70.  — Benjamin  Franklin,  '82.  — Le 
romantisme  des  classiques,  5  vols.,  '82-'86.  — Lamartine,  2  vols.,  '93.  — Lea  de- 
formations de  la  langue  fr.,  '98,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Nouveaux  lundis,  ix,  '64.  —  Lemattre,  Lea  contemporains, 
vii,  '99.  —  G.  Deschamps,  La  vie  et  lea  limes,  v,  1900. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  401 

Desjardins  (Paul),  1859. 

La  methode  des  classiques  fr.,  1904. 

Doudan  (Ximenes,),  1800-1872.  Preceptor  of  Louis-Alphonse  de  Rocca, 
son  of  Mme.  de  Stael  by  her  second  marriage;  later  preceptor  of  Paul  and  Al- 
bert de  Broglie.  —  Held  a  position  in  the  Government  under  the  due  de  Broglie 
and  spent  the  rest  of  his  life  in  his  household.  —  Doudan's  letters  to  various 
friends,  along  with  a  few  articles  he  had  contributed  to  the  Revue  francaise, 
were  published  in  1876-'77,  under  the  title  of  Melanges  et  Lettres  (4  vols.), 
with  introductory  notices  by  M.  d'Haussonville,  Silvestre  de  Sacy,  and  Cu- 
villier-Fleury.  —  Doudan  is  a  type  of  the  distinguished  valetudinarian.  He 
shows  a  delicacy  and  penetration  in  many  of  his  literary  judgments  that  re- 
mind one  of  Joubert. 

Douznic  (Ren6) ,  1860.  A  regular  contributor  to  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes. 

—  Member  of  Academy  from  1909. —  Very  conservative  in  his  point  of  view. 
His  special  note  may  perhaps  be  best  defined  as  a  somewhat  caustic  good  sense. 

Elements  d'histoire  litteraire,  1888.  —  Portraits  d'ecrivains,  '92.  —  Notice  sur 
les  ecrivains  maritimes  et  militaires,  '92.  —  De  Scribe  A  Ibsen,  '93.  — Etudes  lit- 
teraires sur  les  auteurs  fr.  presents  pour  I'examen  du  brevet  superieur,  '93.  — 
Ecrivains  d'aujourd'hui,  "94.  — La  vie  et  les  mceurs  au  jour  le  jour,  '95.  — Lea 
jeunes,  "95.  — Essais  sur  le  thedtre  contemporain,  '96.  — Etudes  sur  la  litt.  fr.,  6 
vols.,  '96-1909.  — Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  '00.  — Hommes  et  idees  du  XIXe  siecle, 
'03. — Lettres  d'Elvire  o.  Lamartine,  '05. — Le  theatre  nouveau,  '08. — George 
Sand,  '09.  — Lamartine,  '12,  etc. 

Du  Camp  (Maximo),  1822-1894.  Novelist,  traveller,  soldier  (one  of  Gari- 
baldi's "  Thousand  ") ,  etc. ;  intimate  of  Flaubert.  —  Member  of  Academy  from 
1880. 

Souvenirs  litteraires,  2  vols.,  1882-'83.  —  Theophile  Gautier,  '90,  etc. 

Dumas  flls  ( Alexandra) ,  1824-1895. 

Discours  de  reception,  1875.  — Les  prefaces,  '77.  —  Reponse  d  M.  Leconte  Oe 
Lisle,  successeur  de  V.  Hugo,  '87. 

Dupuy  (Ernest),  1849. 

Les  grands  maitres  de  la  litt.  russe  au  XIXe  siecle,  1885.  —  Victor  Hugo,  '86. 

—  Victor  Hugo,  son  aeuvre  poetique,  '87.  — Bernard  Palissy,  '94.  —  Paradoxe 
sur  le  comedien  de  Diderot,  1902,  etc. 

Ernest-Charles  (Jean),  1875.   Editor,  literary  and  dramatic  critic. 
La  litt.  fr.  d'aujourd'hui,  1902.  — Les  Samedis  litteraires,  5  vols.,  '03-'07.  — 
La  carriere  de  Maurice  Barres,  '07,  etc. 

Faguet  (Emile),  1847.  Professor  of  French  Poetry  at  the  Sorbonne  from 
1897;  member  of  Academy  from  1900.  —  The  most  prominent  French  critic 
of  ideas  now  living.  As  a  literary  critic,  he  seems  to  me  very  inferior  to  M. 
Lemaltre.  His  best  and  most  characteristic  work  is  probably  found  in  his  Po- 
litigues  et  moralistes.  He  shows  here  and  elsewhere  a  brilliancy  and  intellectual 
ubiquity  that  is  not  sufficiently  controlled  by  any  vigorous  synthesis  of  his  own. 
Recently  he  has  been  pouring  out  volumes  at  a  rate  that  suggests  a  certain  in- 
tellectual incontinence. 

La  tragedie  fr.  au  XV Ie  siecle,  1883.  — Les  grands  mattres  au  XVI Ie  siecle, 
'85.  —  Notices  litteraires  sur  les  auteurs  fr.,  '85.  —  La  Fontaine,\'85.  —  Comeille, 
'85.  —  Recueil  de  textes  des  auteurs  fr.,  '85.  — Etudes  litteraires  au  XIXe  siecle, 
'87.  —  Notes  sur  le  thedtre  contemporain,  7  vols.,  '89-'95.  —  Etudes  litteraires 


402  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

du  XVI Ie  siecle,  '90.  —Etudes  litteraires  du  XV Ie  siecle,  '93.  —  Politiques  et 
moralistesduXIX'  aiecle,  3  vols.,  '91-'99.  —  Voltaire,  '94.  — Cours  de  poesiefr.  it 
I'  Univeraitl  de  Paris,  '97.  —  Drame  ancien,  drome  moderne,  '98.  — Flaubert,  '99. 
—  Question  poltiique,  '99. —  Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  2  vols.,  1900.  —  Problemes 
politiques  du  temps  present,  '01.  — Andre  Chenier,  '02.  — Le  liberalisme,  '02.  — La 
politique  comparee  de  Montesquieu,  Rousseau  et  Voltaire,  '02.  —  Propos  litteraires, 
I,  '02;  ii,  '04;  in,  '05;  iv,  '08;  v,'09.  —  Propos  de  theatre,  i,  '03;  n,  '05;  m,  iv,  '06; 
V,  "10. — Zola,  '03. —  Enlisant  Nietzsche,  '04. — Simplification  simple  de  I'ortho- 
graphe,  '05.  — Amours  de  gens  de  lettres,'  06.  — L'anticlericalisme,  06.  — Le  socia- 
lisme  en  1907,  '07.  — Le  Pacifisme,  '08.  — Discussions  politiques,  '09.  — Les  dix 
commandements,  i,  De  V  amour,  n,  De  I'amitie,  2  vols.  '09.  — La  demission  de  la 
morale,  '10.  —  Madame  de  Sevigne,  '10.  —  Le  culte  de  I' incompetence,  2  vols., 
'10.  —  Vie  de  Rousseau,  '11.  —  Ferdinand  Brunetiere,  '11. — En  lisant  lea  beaux 
vieux  livres,  '11.  — Les  dix  commandements :  de  la  profession," 11.  — Les  dix  com- 
mandements: de  Dieu,  '11. — Et  Vhorreur  des  responsabilites  (suite  au  Culte  de 
V incompetence),  '11. — Les  prejuges  necessaires,  '11. — Les  amies  de  Rousseau, 
'12.  —  Rousseau  contre  Moliere,  '12.  —  Ce  que  disent  les  livres,  '12. 
See  M.  Duval,  E.  Faguet,  Ie  critique,  Ie  moraliste,  Ie  sociologue,  '11. 

Fauriel  (Claude-Charles),  1772-1844.  Private  secretary  to  Napoleon's 
police  agent,  Fouche,  to  1802.  —  Professor  at  the  Sorbonne  from  '30.  —  Member 
of  Academic  des  Inscriptions  from  '36. 

La  Partheneide,  poeme  de  J.  Baggesen  traduit  de  1'allemand  par  C.  F.  (with 
important  preliminary  discourse),  1810.  —  Le  comte  de  Carmagnola  et  Adelghis, 
tragedies  d'Alexandre  Manzoni,  traduitesde  1'italien  par  C.  F.;  suivied'un  arti- 
cle de  Goethe  et  de  divers  morceaux  sur  la  theorie  de  I'art  dramatique,  '23.  —  Chants 
populaires  de  la  Grece  moderne,  2  vols.,  '24-'25.  —  Histoire  de  la  Gaule  meridio- 
nale  sous  la  domination  des  conquerants  germains,  4  vols.,  '36.  —  Histoire  de  la 
croisade  contre  les  heretiques  albigeois  (traduite  du  provencal),  '37.  —  Histoire 
de  la  poesie  provencale,  3  vols.,  '47.  —  Dante  et  les  origines  de  la  langue  et  de  la 
litt.  italienne,  2  vols.,  '54  (this  work  as  well  as  the  preceding  was  published  from 
notes  taken  at  his  courses  by  J.  Mohl).  — Les  dernier s  jours  du  Consulat,  '85.  — 
Correspondence  de  Fauriel  et  Mary  Clarke,  1911. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  contemporains,  iv,  1845.  —  A.  Ozanam,  Melanges, 
ii,  '59.  —  J.  B.  Galley,  Claude  Fauriel,  1909  (for  very  full  list  of  publications  of 
Fauriel  and  works  on  him  see  488  ff). 

Feletz  (Charles-Marie  Dorimont,  abbe  de),  1767-1850.  An  editor  of  the 
Journal  des  Debats  from  1801 ;  member  of  Academy  from  1827,  etc.  He  is  at 
once  keen  and  amiable  in  his  criticism. 

Melanges  de  philosophic,  d'histoire,  et  de  litt.,  4  vols.,  1828.  —  Jugements  his- 
toriques  et  litteraires  sur  quelques  ecrivains  et  sur  quelques  ecrits  du  temps,  '40. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Causeries  du  lundi,  I,  '50.  —  Villemain,  Souvenirs  con- 
temporains d'histoire  et  de  litt.,  i,  1853. 

Filon  (Augustin),  1841. 

Guy  Patin,  sa  vie,  sa  correspondence,  1862.  — Etudes  sur  les  lettres  portugaises 
(1669),  '63.  —  Histoire  de  la  litt.  anglaise,  '83.  —  Profils  anglais,  '93.  —  Meri- 
mee  et  ses  amis,  '94.  — Le  theatre  anglais.  Hier,  aujourd'hui,  demain,  '96.  — 
De  Dumas  d,  Rostand,  '98.  —  Merimee,  '98.  — La  caricature  en  Angleterre,  1902, 
etc. 

Flat  (Paul) ,  1865.   Novelist,  art  critic,  etc. ;  editor  of  Revue  Bleue. 

Essais  sur  Balzac,  1893.  —  Seconds  essais  sur  Balzac,  '94.  —  Nos  femmes  de 
lettres,  1908,  etc. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  403 

Pontanes  (le  comte  Louis  de),  1759-1821.  Poet  and  critic.  —  Became 
acquainted  with  Chateaubriand  when  both  were  exiles  in  London.  —  Grand 
Master  of  the  University  from  1808. 

Extraita  critiques  du  Genie  du  Christianisme,  1802.  —  (Enures,  2  vola.,  avec 
notices  de  Chateaubriand  et  de  Sainte-Beuve,  '39. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Chateaubriand  et  son  groupe  litteraire,  1860. 

France  (Anatole),  1844.  If  M.  France's  criticism  is  often  that  of  a  creator, 
his  creative  writing  (novels,  etc.),  on  the  other  hand,  is  very  much  permeated 
by  criticism. 

Alfred  de  Vigny,  1868.  — B.  de  Saint-Pierre  et  Marie  Miesnik,  '75. — Lucile 
de  Chateaubriand,  '79.  — La  vie  litteraire,  4  vols.,  '88-'94.  — L'Elvire  deLamar- 
tine,  '93.  —  Discours  de  reception,  '97.  —  Discours  prononce  a  I' inauguration  de 
la  statue  d'E.  Renan  a  Treguier,  1903.  — Funerailies  d'E.  Zola,  '03,  etc. 

For  controversy  with  Brunetiere  see  prefaces  to  the  four  volumes  of  his  Vie 
litteraire ;  also  Brunetiere,  Essais  sur  la  litterature  contemporaine  (La  Critique 
impressioniste) ,  '91,  etc. 

Gautier  (Th6ophile),  1811-1872.  Much  of  Gautier's  critical  writing  was 
done  as  hack  work  for  various  newspapers  (in  his  own  phrase  he  turned  the  mill 
of  the  feuilleton),  especially  (from  1845),  for  the  Moniteur  and  Journal  Officiel. 
His  criticism  is  remarkable  for  its  extreme  appreciativeness.  He  is  a  "creative" 
critic  in  the  sense  that  is  given  to  that  phrase  by  certain  neo-romanticists.  A 
classicist  would  say  that  he  confuses  the  genres. 

Les  Jeune-France,  1833.  —  Preface  de  Mile,  de  Maupin,  '35.  — Les  grotesques, 
2  vols.,  '44.  —  Zigzags,  '45.  — Le  Salon  de  1847,  '47.  — L'art  moderne,  '52.  — 
Caprices  et  Zigzags,  '52.  —  Histoire  de  I'art  dramatique  en  France  depuis  25  ans, 
6  vols.,  '58-'59.  —  H.  de  Balzac,  '59.  —  Tresors  d'art  de  la  Russie  ancienne  et  mod- 
erne,  *61-'63.  — Les  dieux  et  les  demi-dieux  de  la  peinture,  '63.  —  Histoire  du 
romantisme,  '74.  —  Portraits  contemporains,  '74.  —  Portraits  et  souvenirs,  '75. 

—  Fusains  et  eaux-fortes,  '80.  —  Souvenirs  de  theatre,  d'art  et  de  critique,  '83. 
See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  contemporains,    n,   1838;  Premiers  lundis,  n, 

'38.  —  Baudelaire,  Th.  Gautier ;  Notice  litteraire  pricedee  d'une  letlre  de  V.  Hugo, 
'59.  —  Brandes,  The  Romantic  School  in  France,  '82.  —  Montegut,  Nos  marts 
contemporains,  n,  '84.  —  Faguet,  Etudes  sur  le  XIXe  si&cle,  '87. 

Gazier  (Augustin),  1844.  Historian  and  critic.  —  Chiefly  interested  in 
Port-Royal. 

Petite  histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.  depuis  la  Renaissance,  1891.  —  Melanges  de  litt. 
et  d'histoire,  1904.  —  Port-Royal-des-Champs,  '05.  —  Une  suite  d  I'histoire  de 
Port-Royal,  '06.  —  Abrege  de  I'histoire  de  Port-Royal,  '09.  —  Port-Royal  au 
XVII*  siecle,  '09,  etc. 

Gebhart  (Emile),  1839-1908.  Professor  of  Foreign  Literature  at  the 
Sorbonne ;  Member  of  Academy,  etc. 

Histoire  du  sentiment  poetique  de  la  nature  dans  I'antiquite  grecque  et  romaine, 
1860. — Praxitele,  essai  sur  I'histoire  de  I'art  et  du  genie  grecs,  '64.  —  De  V Italic ; 
essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire,  '76.  —  Rabelais,  la  Renaissance  et  la  Reforme,  '77. 

—  Les  origines  de  la  Renaissance  en  Italic,  '79.  —  Introduction  d  I'histoire  du 
sentiment  religieux  en  Italie  depuis  la  fin  du  XI Ie  si&cle  au  Concile  de  Trente,  '84. 

—  Etudes  meridionales;  la  Renaissance  italienne,  et  la  philosophic  de  I'histoire, 
'87.  — L' Italie  mystique,  '90.  —  Autour  d  'une  tiare  (1075-'85),  "93.  —  Rabelais, 
'05.  —  Le  baccalaureat  et  les  etudes  classiques,  '99.  —  Conteurs  Florentine  du 
moyen  age,  '01.  —  Sandra  Botticelli,  '07.  —  Michel  Ange,  '08,  etc. 


404  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

Geoffrey  (Julien-Louis),  1743-1814.  Pupil  of  Jesuits  and  professor  at  the 
College  Louis-le-Grand.  Collaborates  with  Freron  on  Annee  litteraire.  —  In 
hiding  during  Revolution.  —  Creates  literary  feuilleton  as  dramatic  critic  of 
Journal  des  Debats,  1800-' 14. 

Discours  sur  la  critique,  1779.  —  Cours  de  lilt,  dramatique,  6  vols.,  1819-'20. 

—  Manuel  dramatique,  '22,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Causeries  du  lundi,  i,  1850.  —  Lemaitre,  Geoffroy,  in  Livre 
du  centenaire  du  Journal  des  Debats,  '89.  —  Des  Granges,  Geoffroy  el  la 
litterature  dramatique  sous  le  consulat  et  I'empire,  '97. 

Geruzez  (Eugdne-Nicolas) ,  1799-1865. 

Histoire  de  I 'eloquence  politique  et  religieux,  2  vols.,  1837-'38.  — Essais  de  litt. 
fr.,  2  vols.,  '39.  — Essais  d'histoire  litteraire,  '39. —  Cours  de  litt.  conforme  au 
plan  d'etudes  des  lycees,  '41.  —  Nouveaux  essais  d'histoire  litteraire,  '45.  — 
Etudes  litteraires  sur  les  outrages  fr.  presents  pour  les  examens  des  baccalaureats 
es  lettres  et  es  science,  '49.  —  Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.  du  moyen  Age  aux  temps  mo- 
dernes,  '52.  — Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.  pendant  la  Revolution  (1789-1800),  '59.  — 
Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  2  vols.,  '61.  —  Histoire  abregee  de  la  litt.  fr.,  '62.  —  Me- 
langes et  pensees,  '66. 

Gidel  (Antoine-Charles),  1827-1899. 

Etude  sur  la  litt.  grecque  moderne,  1866.  — Les  Francois  au  XVI Ie  siecle,  '73. 

—  Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  4  vols.,  '74-'88.  — L'art  d'ecrire,  '78.  —  Dictionnaire- 
Manuel  illustre  des  ecriT>ains  et  des  litt.  (avec  F.  Loliee),  '97. 

Giraud  (Victor),  1868. 

Pascal,  I'homme,  I'&uvre,  I'influence,  1898.  —  Taine  et  le  pessimisme,  '98.  — 
La  philosophic  de  Taine,  '99.  — Essai  sur  Taine,  1900.  —  Taine  (bibliographic), 
'02.  —  Histoire  des  variations  d'une  page  de  Chateaubriand,  '03.  — La  philo- 
sophic religieuse  de  Pascal  et  la  pensee  contemporaine,  '03.  —  Chateaubriand. 
Etudes  litteraires  '04. — Anticlericalisme  et  catholicisme,  '06. — Livres  et  ques- 
tions d'aujourd'hui,  '06.  — Ferdinand  Brunetiere,  '07.  — Les  Idees  morales 
d' Horace,  '07. — Les  Mattres  de  I'heure,  '11. —  Nouvelles  itudes  sur  Chateau- 
briand,'^, etc. 

Les  de  Goncourt  frSres.  Jules,  1830-1870.  Edmond,  1822-1896.  Nov- 
elists, etc. 

Histoire  de  la  societefr.  pendant  le  Directoire,  1855.  — L'art  au  XVI I Ie  siecle, 
3  vols.,  '56-'65.  —  Portraits  intimes  du  XVIIIe  siecle,  2  vols.,  '57-'58.  — Le 
journal  des  Goncourt,  7  vols.,  '87-'95.  —  Prefaces  et  manifestos  littSraires,  '88. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Nouveaux  lundis,  iv,  1862;  x,  '66.  —  Bourget,  Nou- 
veaux  essais  de  psychologie  contemporaine,  '85.  —  Lemattre,  Les  Contemporains, 
in,  '88.  —  France,  La  vie  litteraire,  i,  '88.  —  Doumic,  Portraits  d'ecrivains,  '92 ; 
Etudes  sur  la  litt.  fr.,  n,  '98. 

Gourmont  (Remy  de),  1860.  Editor  of  Mercure  de  France.  —  Ultra-ses- 
thetic  in  his  point  of  view. 

LeLatin  mystique,  1892.  —  La  Poesie  populaire,  '96.  —  Esthetique  de  la  langue 
fr.,  '99.  — La  culture  des  idees,  '00.  — Le  Probleme  du  style,  '02.  —  Promenades 
litteraires,  3  vols.,  '05-'09.  —  Dante,  Beatrice  et  la  poesie  amoureuse,  '08,  etc. 

Greard  (Octave),  1828-1904.  Exercised  both  by  his  writings  and  as  an  ad- 
ministrator an  important  influence  on  modern  French  education.  —  Member 
of  Academy  from  1886. 

Precis  de  litt.,  1875.  —  Discours  de  reception,  '88.  — Edmond  Scherer,  '90.  — 
Prevost-Paradol,  '94,  etc. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  405 

Guizot  (Trangois-Pierre- Guillaume),  1787-1874.  Historian,  statesman, 
etc.  —  Begins  lecturing  at  the  Sorbonne,  1812.  —  Course  suspended  by  Govern- 
ment in  '22.  —  Begins  lecturing  again  at  same  time  as  Cousin  and  Yillemaiii 
in  '28.  —  Appointed  Minister  of  Interior  by  Louis-Philippe,  '30.  —  Member 
of  Academy  from  '36.  —  Virtually  Premier  from  '40  to  '48. 

Shakespeare  et  son  temps,  1852.  —  Discours  academiques,  '61.  —  Melanges 
biographigues  et  litteraires,  '68,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Causeries  du  lundi,  i,  1850;  Nouveaux  lundis,  i,  '61;  ix, 
'64.  —  Taine,  Essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire,  '58.  —  Soberer,  Etudes  critiques  sur 
la  litt.  contemporaine,  i,  '63;  rv,  '73.  —  Faguet,  PolUiques  et  moralistes  au  XIX" 
siecle,  '91. 

Haussonville  (le  vicomte  Othenin  d')f  1843.  —  Member  of  Academy 
from  1888. 

C.-A.  Sainte-Beuve,  sa  vie  et  ses  centres,  1875. —  Etudes  biographiques  et  lit- 
teraires, '79.  — Le  salon  de  Mme.  Necker,  2  vols.,  '82.  —  Prosper  Merimee,  '88. 
—  Mme.  Ackermann,  d'apres  des  lettres  et  papiers  inedits,  '92.  — Lacordaire, 
'95.  —  Souvenirs  sur  Mme.  de  Maintenon,  3  vols.,  1902-'05.  —  A  I'Academie 
franc.aise  et  autour  de  V  Academic,  '07,  etc. 

Hauvette  (Henri),  1865.  Professor  of  Italian  at  the  Sorbonne. 

Luigi  Alamanni,  1903. — Lilt,  italienne,  '06. — Ghirlandaio,  '08.  —  Dante, 
'11,  etc. 

Hennequin  (Emile),  1859-1888.  Drowned  while  bathing  in  the  Seine. 
The  scientific  theories  of  H.,  which  attracted  much  attention  a  few  years  ago, 
are  already  beginning  to  seem  pseudo-scientific.  He  has  remarks  of  great  pene- 
tration interspersed  with  remarks  like  the  following:  "  Predominance  probable, 
dans  1'organisme  cerebral  de  Victor  Hugo,  .  .  .  de  la  troisieme  circonvolution 
frontale." 

La  critique  scientifique,  1888.  — Etudes  de  critique  scientifique.  Ecrivains  fran- 
cises,  '89.  — Etudes  de  critique  scientifique.  Quelques  ecrivains  fr.,  '90. 

See  Brunetiere,  Questions  de  critique,  '88.  —  Tissot,  Les  evolutions  de  la 
critique  fr.,  '90.  —  Rod,  Nouvettes  etudes  sur  le  XIX*  siecle,  '98. 

Hugo  (Victor),  1802-1885.  His  general  outlook  on  life  was  uncritical  or,  one 
might  say,  anti-critical.  For  his  literary  opinions  see  various  prefaces  to  Odes 
et  Ballades  (1822,  '24,  '26,  '28,  '53) ;  also  prefaces  to  his  other  volumes  of  verse 
(Feuilles  d'automne,  '34;  Chants  du  Crepuscule,  '35;  Les  voix  interieures,  '37;  Les 
Rayons  et  les  ombres,  '40;  Les  Contemplations,  '56,  etc.).  His  most  important 
manifesto  was  his  Preface  de  Cromwell,  '27  (ed.  M.  Souriau,  with  very  full  in- 
troduction, '97).  —  See  also  prefaces  to  other  plays  (Hernani,  '29;  Marion  de 
Lorme,  '30;  Le  Roi  s' amuse,  '32 ;  Lucrece  Borgia,  '33;  Marie  Tudor,  '33;  Angela, 
'35;  RuyBlas,  36;LesBurgraves,  '43).  — Litt.  et  philosophic  melees,  2  vols.,  '34.  — 
William  Shakespeare,  '64.  —  Discours  pour  Voltaire,  '78,  etc. 

Janin  (Jules),  1804-1874.  Dramatic  critic  of  Journal  des  Debats  from  1830. 
Styled  in  his  own  day  the  "  prince  of  critics."  Expansive  and  superficial,  a  sort 
of  bourgeois  impressionist.  He  defined  the  feuilleton  as  "  un  petit  cri  de  joie 
que  nous  arrache  le  spectacle  du  jour." 

Histoire  de  la  litt.  dramalique,  6  vols.,  1853— '58.  — Critiques,  portraits  et  carac- 
teres  contemporains,  '59.  —  Varietes  litteraires,  '59.  —  Beranger  et  son  temps, 
2  vols.,  '66.  —  CEuvres  diverses,  12  vols.,  '76-'78.  —  (Euvres  de  jeunesse,  5  vols., 
'81-'83,  etc. 

See  F.  Pyat,  M .  J.  Chenier  et  le  prince  des  critiques  (J.  Janin),  1844.  — 


406  LIST  OF  CEITICS 

Planche,  Portraits  litteraires,  '53. —  Sainte-Beuve,  Causeries  au  lundi,  n,  '50; 
v,  '51.  —  B.  d'Aurevilly,  Les  aeuvres  et  les  hommes,  iv,  '65.  —  Gautier,  Portraits 
contemporains,  '74. 

Joubert  (Joseph) .  Born  at  Montignac,  1754;  died  at  Paris,  1824. —  Student 
and  professor  in  the  College  des  Peres  de  la  Doctrine  Chretienne  (Toulouse).  — 
Goes  to  Paris,  1778,  and  meets  Diderot,  La  Harpe,  etc.  —  Becomes  intimate 
with  Fontanes.  —  Elected  Justice  of  Peace  at  Montignac,  1790.  —  Marriage, 
1793.  —  Settles  at  Villeneuve-sur-Yonne.  —  Appointed  ' '  inspecteur  et  conseiller 
de  1'Universite,"  1809. 

Selection  of  Pensees  published  -by  Chateaubriand,  1838.  —  Enlarged  edi- 
tion published  by  nephew  of  Joubert,  M.  Paul  de  Raynal  (Pensees,  Essais, 
Maximes  et  Correspondence,  2  vols.,  1842;  4*  ed.,  augm.,  '64).  —  Pensees  de 
Joubert;  reproduction  de  1'edition  originale.  Introduction  et  notes  par  V- 
Giraud,  4«  6d.,  1911. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  litteraires,  n,  1838;  Causeries  du  lundi,  i,  '49. — 
Sacy,  Varietes  litteraires,  I,  '58.  —  Matthew  Arnold,  Essays  in  Criticism,  '65.  — 
P.  de  Raynal,  Les  correspondent  de  Joubert  (1785-1822),  '83.  —  Lemattre,  Lea 
contemporains,  vi,  '96.  —  Pailhes,  Du  Nouveau  sur  Joubert,  1900. 

Jusserand  (Jules),  1855.  French  ambassador  to  United  States  from  1902. 

Les  Anglais  au  moyen  age.  L'Epopee  mystique  de  William  Langkmd,  1893.  — 
Histoire  litteraire  du  peuple  anglais :  i,  Des  origines  a  la  Renaissance,  '94;  n,  De 
la  Renaissance  a  la  guerre  civile,  1904.  —  Histoire  abregee  de  la  litt.  anglaise,  '95- 

—  Shakespeare  en  France  sous  I'ancien  regime,  '98,  etc. 

Lamartine  (Alphonse),  1790-1869.  Most  of  his  literary  criticism  was 
written  under  pecuniary  stress  in  his  old  age. 

Des  Destinies  de  la  poesie,  1834.  — Cowrs  familier  de  litt.,  28  vols.,  '56-'69. 

—  Bossuet,  '64. — Ciceron,   '64. — Shakspeare  et  son  ceuvre,   '64. — Balzac  et 
son  ceuvre,  '65.  —  Trois  poetes  italiens :  Dante,  Petrarque,  Le  Tasse  (extrait  du 
cours  de  litt.),  '92. —  Philosophic  et  litt.,  '94,  etc. 

Laprade,  Victor  de,  1812-1883.  Poet  and  critic.  — Professor  at  University 
of  Lyons.  —  Succeeds  A.  de  Musset  at  Academy,  '58. 

Le  genie  litteraire  de  la  France,  1848.  —  Du  sentiment  de  la  nature  dans  la 
poesie  d'Homere,  '48.  — Le  sentiment  de  la  nature  avant  le  christianisme,  '66.  — 
Le  sentiment  de  la  nature  chez  les  modernes,  '67.  —  Essais  de  critique  idealiste, 
'82.  —  Histoire  du  sentiment  de  la  nature,  '83. 

Larroumet  (Gustavo),  1852-1904. 

Marivaux,  sa  vieetses  ozuvres,  1883. — LaComedie  deMoliere.  L'auteuretle 
Milieu,  '86.  —  <Sa/on  de  1892,  '92.  —  Notice  sur  le  prince  Napoleon  Bonaparte, 
'92.  —  Etudes  d'histoire  et  de  critique  dramatique,  '92.  —  Etudes  de  litt.  et  d'art, 
4  vols.,  '93-'96.  —  Meissonier,  '93.  — L'artetl'Etat  en  France,  '95.  — La  maison 
de  V.  Hugo.  Impressions  de  Guemesey,  '95.  —  Petits  portraits  et  notes  d'art,  '97.  — 
La  France  en  Orient,  '98.  —  Racine,  '98.  —  Vers  Athenes  et  Jerusalem.  Journal 
de  voyage  en  Grece  et  en  Syrie,  '98.  —  Nouvelles  ttudes  d'histoire  et  de  critique 
dramatique,  '99.  —  Derniers  portraits,  1904. 

Lasserre  (Pierre),  1867. 

La  crise  chretienne,  1891.  —  Charles  Maurras  et  la  renaissance  classique,  1902. 
— La  morale  de  Nietzsche,  '02.  — Les  idees  de  Nietzsche  sur  la  musique,  '07.  — 
Le  romantisme  Jr.,  '07.  —  M .  Croiset  historien  de  la  democratic  athenienne,  '09. 

—  La  Doctrine  officieUe  de  V  Universite,  '12,  etc. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  407 

Lanson  (Gustavo),  1857.    Professor  of  French  literature  at  the  Sorbonne. 

Principea  de  composition  et  de  style,  1887.  —  Nivelle  de  La  Chaussee  et  la 

comedie  larmoyante,  '88.  — Bossuet,  '90.  —  Choix  de  lettres  du  XVII'  siecle,  '90. 

—  Conseils  sur  I'art  d'ecrire,  '90.  — Etudes  pratiques  de  composition  fr.,  '91.  — 
Boileau,  '92.  — Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  '94.  — Hommes  et  litres,  '95.  —  Corneille, 
'95. — L'universite  et  la  societe  moderne,  1901.  —  Voltaire,  '06. — L'Art  de  la 
prose,  '08.  —  Manuel  bibliographique  de  la  litt.  fr.,  I  (XVI«  siecle),  '09;  n  (XVII* 
siecle),  '10;  in,  (XVIII8 siecle),  '11.  —  Troiamoisd'enseignementauxEtats-Unia, 
'12,  etc. 

Leconte  de  Lisle,  1820-1894.  His  most  important  critical  manifesto  is 
the  preface  to  his  Poemes  antiques,  1852. 

Lefranc  (Abel),  1863.  Professor  at  the  College  de  France. 
Les  dernieres  poesies  de  Marguerite  de  Navarre,  1898  (and  numerous  other 
studies  on  the  16th  century).  — Lalangue  et  la  litt.  fr.  au  College  de  France,  '04. 

—  Defense  de  Pascal,  1907.  —  Lefons  sur  Moliere,  '04-'09.  —  Etudes  sur  Maurice 
Guerin,  '08,  etc. 

Legouis  (Emile),  1861.  Professor  of  English  literature  at  the  Sorbonne. 
Le  general  Michel  Beaupuy  (in  collaboration  with  Georges  Bussiere),  1891. 

—  La  jeunesse  de  William  Wordsworth,  '96.  — Geoffrey  Chaucer,  '11.  —  Defense 
de  la  poesie  francaise  a  I'usage  des  lecteurs  anglais,  1912,  etc. 

Lemaitre  (Jules),  1853. 

La  comedie  apres  Moliere  et  le  theatre  de  Dancourt,  1882.  —  Quomodo  Cornelius 
noster  Aristotelis  poeticam  sit  interpretatus,  '82.  — Les  contemporains,  7  vols., 
'85-'99.  —  Impressions  de  thedtre,  10  vols.,  '88-'98.  —  Corneille  et  la  poetique 
d'Aristote,  '88.  — Quatre  discours,  1900.  —  Opinions  A  repandre,  '02.  —  Theories 
et  impressions,  '03. — En  marge  des  vieux  livres,  '05;  2«  s6rie,  '08.  —  Rous- 
seau, '07.  —  Racine,  '08.  — Fenelon,  '10.  —  Chateaubriand,  '12,  etc. 

See  A.  France,  La  vie  litteraire,  I,  1888;  n,  '90.  —  Pellissier,  Nouveaux 
essais  de  litt.  contemporaine,  '94;  Etu  des  de  litt.  contemporaine,  n,  1900.  — 
Doumic,  Ecrivains  d'aujourd'hui,  '95. 

Lemercier  (Nepomuc&ne),  1771-1840.  Dramatist,  etc. 
Cours  analytique  de  litt.  generate,  4  vols.,  1817. 

See  G.  Vauthier,  Essai  sur  la  vie  et  les  oeuvres  de  N.  Lemercier,  '86.  —  M. 
Souriau,  N.  Lemercier  et  ses  correspondents,  '08. 

Lenient  (Charles),  1826-1906. 

Etude  sur  Bayle,  1855.  — La  satire  en  France  au  moyen  dge,  '59.  — La  satire 
en  France  ou  la  litt.  militante  au  XVIe  siecle,  '66.  —  Conferences  sur  les  ceuvres 
poetiques  de  M.  Pierre  Lebrun,  '66.  —  La  comedie  en  France  au  XVIIIe  siecle, 
'88.  — La  poesie  patriotique  en  France  au  moyen  dge,  '91.  — La  poesie  patriotique 
en  France,  2  vols., '94.  — La  comedie  en  France  au  XIXe  siecle,  2  vols.,  '98,  etc. 

Levallois  (Jules),  1829-1903.  Sainte-Beuve's  secretary  for  a  number  of 
years. 

Critique  militante,  1862.  —  Sainte-Bcuve,  '72.  —  Corneille  inconnu,  76.  — 
Un  precurseur :  Senancour,  '97,  etc. 

Lintilhac  (Eugene),  1854. 

Beaumarchais  et  ses  ceuvres,  1887.  —  Precis  historique  et  critique  de  la  litt.  fr. 
depuis  les  origines  A  nos  jours,  2  vols.,  '91-'94.  — Supplement  aux  Etudes  lit- 
teraires  sur  lea  dassiques  des  classes  supirieures  et  du  baccalaureat  es  lettres,  '92. 


408  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

— Lesagc,  '93.  — Lea  felibres,  '94.  — Le  miracle  grec  d'Homere  A  Aristote,  '96. 
—  Conferences  dramatiques,  '98.  —  Michelet,  '98.  — Le  probleme  de  I'enseigne- 
ment  secondaire,  '98.  —  Histoire  du  thedtre  en  France,  i,  1904;  n,  '06;  in,  '08;  iv, 
'09;  v,  '11. 

Livet  (Charles-Louis),  1828-1898. 

La  grammaire  fr.  et  les  grammairiens  au  XVIIe  siecle,  1859.  —  Precieux  et 
precieuses,  '59.  —  Portraits  du  grand  siecle,  '85.  —  Lexique  de  la  langue  de  Mo- 
liere,  3  vols.,  '96-'97. 

Lomenie  (Louis  de),  1818-1878. 

Galerie  des  contemporains  illustres,  10  vols.,  1840- '47.  — Beaumarchais  et  son 
temps,  2  vols.,  '55. — Les  Mirabeau,  5  vols.,  '78— '91. — Esquisses  historiques 
et  litteraires,  '79. 

Magnin  (Charles),  1793-1862.  A  critic  of  romantic  leaning.  Dramatic 
critic  on  Globe  and  later  on  National.  —  Librarian  at  Bibliotheque  nationale.  — 
Substitutes  for  Fauriel  at  Sorbonne,  etc. 

Origines  du  thedtre  en  Europe,  1838.  —  Causeries  et  Meditations,  '42.  —  Thed- 
tre de  Hroswitha,  '45.  —  Histoire  des  marionnettes  en  Europe,  '52,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  con.,  in,  1843;  N.Lundis,  v,  '63. 

Martha  (Constant),  1820-1895.  Professor  of  Latin  at  Sorbonne  from!869. 

De  la  morale  pratique  dans  les  lettres  de  Seneque,  1854.  — Lea  morolistes  sous 
I'Empire  romain,  '64.  — Le  poeme  de  Lucrece,  '69.  — Etudes  morales  sur  I'anti- 
quite,  '83.  — La  delicatesse  dans  I'art,  '84.  —  Melanges  de  litt.  ancienne,  '96. 

Maurras  (Charles-Marie-Photius),  1868.  Has  actively  defended  classi- 
cism against  modern  laxity  and  corruption  of  taste,  in  such  a  way,  however,  as 
to  mix  up  the  whole  question  of  classic  and  romantic  art  with  politics.  —  Be- 
sides numerous  contributions  to  various  newspapers  and  reviews  (especially 
L' Action  franchise) ,  and  books  on  social  and  political  questions,  has  published: 
Jean  M 'areas,  1891.  —  Trois  Idees  politiques :  Chateaubriand,  Michelet,  Sainte- 
Beuve,  '98.  — -Les  amants  de  Venise,  George  Sand  et  Musset,  1902.  — L'Avenir  de 
V intelligence,  '05,  etc. 

Merimee  (Prosper),  1803-1870.   Novelist,  archaeologist,  etc. 

Melanges  historiques  et  litteraires,  1855.  —  Portraits  historiques  et  litteraires, 
'75,  etc. 

Merlet  (Gustave),  1828-1891.  Exercised  an  important  influence  on  numer- 
ous pupils  as  Professor  of  "  Rhetoric  "  at  Lycee  Charlemagne  and  Lycee  Louis- 
le-Grand. 

Le  realisme  et  la  fantaisie  dans  la  litt.,  1861.  —  Portraits  d'hier,  etc.,  '63.  — 
Causeries  sur  les  femmes  et  les  livres,  '65.  —  Hommes  et  livres,  '69.  —  Saint- 
Evremond,  etude  historique,  morale  et  litteraire,  '70. — Etudes  litteraires  sur  les 
classiques  fr.,  '75. — Etudes  litteraires  sur  les  classiques  fr.  (XV II- XV 1 1  le 
siecles),  '76.  —  Tableau  de  la  litt.  fr.  (1800-'15),  3  vols.,  '77-'80.  —Etudes  lit- 
teraires sur  la  Chanson  de  Roland,  '82.  —  Etudes  litteraires  sur  les  grands  classi- 
ques  latins,  '84.  — Etudeti  litteraires  sur  les  grands  classiques  grecs,  '85.  — An- 
thologie  classique  des  poetes  du  XIXe  siecle,  '90. 

Mezieres  (Alfred),  1826.  Professor  at  Sorbonne  from  1863.  —  Member  of 
Academy  from  1874. 

Shakespeare,  ses  ceuvres  et  ses  critiques,  1861.  —  Les  contemporains  de 
Shakespeare,  '63.  —  Pr/decesseurs  et  contemporains  de  Shakespeare,  '63.  — 
Contempor  ins  et  su'  isseurs  de  Shakespeare,  '64.  —  Dante,  et  V Italic,  '65.  — 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  409 

Petrarque,  '67. — Lasocietffr.  Le  paysan,  etc.,  '69. — Goethe.  Lea ceuvres expliquees 
par  la  vie,  2  vols.,  '72-73.  —  Discours  de  reception,  '75.  —  En  France :  XVIIle  et 
XIXe  siecles,  '83.  —  Reponse  de  M.  Mezieres  au  discours  de  Pierre  Loti,  '92.  — 
Marts  et  vivants,  '97.  —  Au  temps  passe,  '06.  —  Hommes  et  femmea  d'hier  et 
d'avant-hier,  '09.  —  De  Tout  un  peu,  '09,  etc. 

Michiels  (Alfred-Joseph-Xavier),  1813-1892.  Art  critic,  historian,  etc. 
An  enemy  of  Sainte-Beuve. 

Etudes  sur  I'AUemagne,  2  vols.,  1839.  —  Histoire  des  idees  litteraires  en  France 
au  XIX*  siecle,  etc.,  2  vols.,  "42.  — Souvenirs  d'Angleterre,  '44.  — Le  monde 
du  comique  et  du  rire,  '87,  etc. 

Monod  (Gabriel),  1844.  Historian;  Professor  at  College  de  France,  etc. 

Jules  Michelet,  1875.  — Les  maitres  de  I'histoire.   Renan,  Taine,  Michelet,  '94. 

—  Portraits  et  souvenirs,  '97.  — Gaston  Paris,  1903,  etc. 

Montegut  (Emile),  1826-1895.  Historian,  moralist,  critic.  —  Succeeds 
Gustave  Planche  on  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes  (his  first  article  was  on  Emerson). 
One  of  the  chief  interpreters  of  foreign  (especially  English)  literature  to  the 
French  public  during  the  second  half  of  the  19th  century,  and  a  critic  of  deli- 
cacy and  distinction. 

Du  genie  fr.,  1857.  — Essai  sur  I'epoque  actuelle,  '58.  —  Poetes  et  artistes  de 
I' Italic,  '81.  —  Types  litteraires  et  fantaisies  esthetiques,  '82.  — Essais  sur  la  litt. 
anglaise,  '83. —  Nos  morts  contemporains,  2  vols.,  'S3-'84. — Ecrivains  mo- 
dernes  de  I'Angleterre,  3  vols.,  '85.  — Litres  et  Ames  du  pays  d'Orient,  '85.  — 
Choses  du  Nord  et  du  Midi,  '86.  —  Melanges  critiques,  '87.  —  Dramaturges  et 
romanciers,  '90.  —  Heures  de  lectures  d'un  critique,  '91. — Esquisses  litteraires, 
'93,  etc. 

Morice  (Charles),  1861. 

Paul  Verlaine,  1887.  —  Demain.  Questions  d'esthetique,  '88.  —  La  litt.  de 
tout  a  I'heure,  '89.  —  Opinions,  '95.  —  Du  sens  religieux  de  la  poesie.  Sur  le  mot 
poesie.  Le  principe  social  de  la  beaute,  '98.  —  Les  textes  de  Rabelais  et  la  critique 
contemporaine,  1905,  etc. 

Musset  (Alfred  de),  1810-1857.  Indulged  in  satire  occasionally  at  the  ex- 
pense of  his  fellow  romanticists  especially  in  the  Lettres  de  Dupuis  et  Colonel. 

Nettement  (Alf red-Francois) ,  1805-1869.  Strongly  reactionary  in  his 
opinions. 

Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.  sous  la  Restauration,  2  vols.,  1853.  —  Histoire  de  la  litt. 
fr.  sous  le  gouvernement  de  Juittet,  2  vols.,  '55.  —  Poetes  et  artistes  contemporains, 
'62.  —  Le  roman  contemporain,  etc.,  '64,  etc. 

Nisard  (Desirfi) ,  1806-1888.  Writes  for  Journal  des  Debats  and  other  period- 
icals. —  "  Inspector  general  "  of  Education.  —  Professor  at  the  Sorbonne.  — 
Director  of  Normal  School,  member  of  Academy,  etc. 

Etudes  de  mceurs  et  de  critique  sur  les  poetes  latins  de  la,  decadence,  2  vols.,  1834. 

—  Melanges,  '38.  —  Histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  4  vols.,  '44-'61.  — Etudes  sur  la  Renais- 
sance, '55.  —  Souvenirs  de  voyages,  '55. — Etudes  de  cruique  litteraire,  '58. — 
Etudes  d'histoire  et  de  litt.,  '59.  —  NouveUes  etudes  d'histoire  et  de  litt.,  '64.  — 
Melanges  d'histoire  et  de  litt.,  '68.  —  Les  quatre  grands  historiens  latins,  '74.  — 
Portraits  et  Etudes  d'histoire  litteraire,  '74.  —  Renaissance  et  Riforme,  2  vols., 
'77.  —  Discours  academiques  et  universitaires,  '84.  —  Nouveaux  melanges  d'his- 
toire  et  de  litt.,  '86.  —  Considerations  sur  la  Revolution  Jr.  et  Napoleon  I,  '87.  — 
Souvenirs  et  notes  biotrraphiques,  2  vols.,  '88. — jEyri  son  .rii   '89.  —  Essais  sur 
I'ecole  romantique,  '91. 


410  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  contemporaina,  in,  1836;  Causeries  du 
xv,  '64.  —  Scherer,  Etudes  sur  la  litt.  contemporaine,  i,  '63.  —  Dowden,  New 
Studies  in  Literature,  '95.  —  M£zieres,  Pensiea  choisiea  de  D.  Nisard  (cen- 
tenaire),  '06. 

Ozanam  (Alphonse- Frederic) ,  1813-1853.  Succeeds  Fan  rid,  whose  in- 
fluence is  very  marked  upon  him,  as  professor  at  the  Sorbonne  (1845).  —  A  dis- 
tinguished student  of  Dante  and  an  important  figure  in  French  Catholicism  of 
the  19th  century. 

Essai  sur  la  philosophic  de  Dante,  1838.  —  Dante  et  la  philosophic  catholigue  au 
XIII"  siecle,  '39.  — Etudes  germaniques,  2  vols.,  '47-'49.  —  Documents  inedits 
pour  servir  A  I'histoire  litteraire  de  I 'Italic  du  VIIIe-XIIIe  siecles,  '50.  —  (Euvres 
completes,  preface  par  M.  Ampere,  11  vols.,  '62-'65.  — Les  poetes  franciscains  en 
Italic  au  XIIIe  siecle,  '72. 

See  Veuillot,  Melanges  religieux,  etc.,  iv,  1847-'50.  —  Lacordaire,  Frederic 
Ozanam,  '57.  —  Ampere,  Melanges  d'histoire  litteraire  et  de  litt.,  u,  '67.  —  A. 
Ozanam,  Vie  de  F.  Ozanam,  '79.  —  B.  Faulquier,  F.  Ozanam,  '03. 

Parigot  (Hippolyte),  1861. 

Emile  Augier,  1890. — Le  theatre  d'hier,  '93. — Genie  et  mttier,  '94. — Le 
drome  d'Alexandre  Dumas,  '99.  —  Alexandre  Dumas,  pere,  1900.  —  Renan,  '09, 
etc. 

Paris  (Gaston),  1839-1903.  Perhaps  the  most  eminent  of  French  mediaeval 
philologists,  and  also  a  literary  critic  of  distinction.  —  Professor  at  College  de 
France  from  1872 ;  member  of  Academy  from  1896. 

La  poesie  du  moyen  Age,  2  vols.,  1885-'95.  — Les  origines  de  la  poesie  lyrique 
en  France  au  moyen  Age,  '92.  — Francois  ViUon,  1901.  — Esquisse  historique  de 
la  litt.  fr.  du  moyen  age,  "07,  etc. 

Patin  (Henri- Joseph- Guillaume),  1793-1876.  Professor  of  Latin  at  the 
Sorbonne  from  1833;  member  of  Academy  from  1843. 

Melanges  de  litt.  ancienne  et  moderne,  1840.  —  Etudes  sur  les  tragiques  grecs, 
3  vols.,  '41-'43.  — Etudes  sur  la  poesie  latine,  2  vols.,  '69.  —  Discours  et  Me- 
langes litteraires,  '76. 

Pellissier  (Georges),  1852. 

Trait6  theorique  et  historique  de  versification  fr.,  1882.  — Les  Icrivains  politi- 
ques  en  France  avant  la  Revolution,  '82.  —  De  sexti  decimi  saeculi  in  Prancia 
artibus  poetids,  '83.  — La  vie  et  les  ceuvres  de  Du  Bartas,  '83.  — Le  mouvement 
litteraire  au  XIXe  siecle,  '89.  — Essais  de  litt.  contemporaine,  '93.  —  Nouveaux 
essais  de  litt.  contemporaine,  '95.  —  Morceaux  choisis  des  poetes  du  XV Ie  siecle, 
'96.  —  Etudes  de  litt.  contemporaine,  '98.  — Le  mouvement  litteraire  contemporain, 
1901.  —  Prtcis  d'histoire  de  la  litt.  fr.,  '02.  —  Etudes  de  litt.  et  de  morale  cont., 
'05.  —  Voltaire  philosophe,  '08.  — Le  Realisme  du  romantisme,  '12,  etc. 

Petit  de  Julleville  (Louis),  1841-1900.  Professor  at  the  Sorbonne. 

Le  discours  fr.  et  la  dissertation  fr.,  1868.  — L'Ecole  d'Athenes  au  IVe  siecle 
apres  Jesus-Christ,  '68.  —  Histoire  du  theatre  en  France :  les  mysteres,  '80.  — 
Histoire  litteraire,  2  vols.,  '84.  —  Histoire  du  thedtre  en  France :  les  comediens 
en  France  au  moyen  age,  '85.  —  Histoire  du  thtdtre  en  France :  La  comedie  et 
les  mcEurs  en  France  au  moyen  age,  '86.  —  Histoire  du  theatre  en  France :  Re- 
pertoire du  thtdtre  comique  en  France  au  moyen  age,  '86.  — Le  theatre  en  France. 
Histoire  de  la  litt.  dramatique  depuis  les  origines  A  nos  jours,  '89.  —  General  edi- 
tor of  Histoire  de  la  litt.  et  de  la  langue  fr.,  8  vols.,  *96-'99.  —  Histoire  de  la  litt. 
fr.  des  origines  a  nos  jours,  '99. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  411 

Pichot  (Ameclee),  1796-1877.  Historian,  novelist,  poet  f  active  as  a  trans- 
lator of  Byron  and  other  English  writers. 

Notice  aur  Walter  Scott  et  ses  tents,  1821.  — Essai  sur  le  genie  et  le  caractere 
de  Lord  Byron,  '24.  —  Voyage  historique  et  litteraire  en  Angleterre  et  en  Ecoese,  3 
vols.,  '25,  etc. 

Blanche  CGustave),  1808-1857.  Contributes  to  Revue  des  Deux  Monies 
from  1831.  —  Remarkable  for  the  severity  of  his  judgments  on  contemporary 
artists  and  writers  with  many  of  whom  he  was  personally  intimate.  "  A  critic 
of  the  very  first  order,"  according  to  Matthew  Arnold.  The  ordinary  French 
view  is  that  P.  was  a  sort  of  critical  Alceste  —  more  temperamental  than  judi- 
cial in  his  severity. 

Salon  de  1831,  1831.  —  Portraits  litteraires,  2  vols.,  '36. — Nouveaux  por- 
traits litteraires,  2  vols.,  '54.  — Etudes  sur  les  arts,  '55.  — Etudes  sur  Vecole  Jr. 
(1831-'52).  Peinture  et  sculpture,  2  vols.,  '55,  etc. 

See  Michiels,  Histoire  des  idees  litteraires,  etc.,  n,  1842.  —  Mont6gut,  Es- 
quisses  litteraires,  '93. 

Pontmartin  (Armand  de),  1811-1890.  A  reactionary  critic  who  had  some 
lively  skirmishes  with  Sainte-Beuve.  The  literary  satire  in  Les  Jeudis  de  Ma- 
dame Charbonneau  had  a  "  succes  de  scandale." 

Causeries  litteraires,  1854.  — Nouveaux  causeries  litteraires,  '55.  —  Dernieres 
causeries  litteraires,  '56.  —  Causeries  du  samedi,  '57.  —  Nouvelles  causeries  du 
samedi,  '59.  —  Dernieres  causeries  du  samedi,  '60.  — Les  semaines  litteraires,  '61. 

—  Les  jeudis  de  Mme.  Charbonneau,  '62.  —  Les  nouoelles  semaines  litteraires,  '63. 

—  Les  dernieres  semaines  litteraires,  '64.  — Nouveaux  samedis,  20  vols.,  '65-'81. 

—  Souvenirs  d'un  vieux  critique,  10  vols.,  '81-'90.  — Mes  memoires :  enfance  et 
jeunesse,  '85.  —  Mes  memoires :  seconde  jeunesse,  '86.  — Episodes  litteraires,  '90. 

—  Derniers  samedis,  3  vols.,  '91-'92. 

See  Veuillot,  Melanges  religieux,  etc.,  n,  1859.  —  Sainte-Beuve,  Nouveaux 
Lundis,  11,  in,  '62.  —  Eire,  Etudes  et  portraits,  '94. 

Prevost-Paradol  (Lucien-Anatole) ,  1829-1870.  A  comrade  of  Taine's  at 
the  Normal  School.  One  of  the  most  brilliant  publicists  of  the  Second  Empire. 
After  years  of  opposition,  he  rallied  to  the  Empire  and  was  sent  as  minister  to 
the  United  States,  but  committed  suicide  at  Washington  on  the  outbreak  of 
the  war  with  Germany. 

Jonathan  Swift,  1856. — Essais  de  politique  et  de  lift.,  3  vols.,  '59-'63. — 
Etude  surEtienne  de  LaBoetie,  '64.  — Etudes  sur  les  moralistesfr.,  '65. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Nouveaux  Lundis,  i,  1861.  —  Scherer,  Etudes  sur  la  litt. 
contemporaine,  i,  '63 ;  m,  '66;  rv,  '73.  —  Greard,  Prevost-Paradol,  '94.  — Lettres 
de  Prevost-Paradol,  '94,  etc. 

Remusat  (Charles  de),  1797-1875.  Philosopher,  etc.  —  Contributes  to 
Globe  from  1824.  —  Member  of  Academy,  '46.  —  Minister  of  Foreign  Affairs, 
'71-'73. 

Abilard,  2  vols.,  1845.  —  De  la  philosophic  attemande,  '45.  —  Critiques  et 
etudes  litteraires,  2  vols.,  '47.  —  Passe  et  present.  Melanges,  2  vols.,  '47.  —  L' An- 
gleterre au  XVIII'  siede,  2  vols.,  '56.  — Bacon,  '57. —  Channing,  '57.  — Lord 
Herbert  de  Cherbury,  '74,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  litteraires,  in,  1847.  —  Albert,  La  litt.  Jr.  au  XIX* 
siecle,  n,  '85,  etc. 

Renan  (Ernest) ,  1823-1892. —  The  points  of  chief  interest  in  Kenan's  life  are 
those  that  he  himself  has  given  in  his  Souvenirs,  —  his  birth  at  Treguier,  in 


412  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

Brittany,  his  education  at  the  College  de  TrSguier,  and  Saint-Nicolas  du  Char- 
donnet  at  Paris,  his  preparation  for  the  priesthood  at  the  Seminaire  d'Issy  and 
Saint-Sulpice,  his  growing  skepticism  as  the  result  of  historical  and  philological 
research,  and  his  final  rupture  with  Saint-Sulpice  and  Catholicism  (October, 
1846).  —  Renan  spends  the  next  three  years  and  a  half  as  a  tutor  in  the  Pension 
Crouzet,  where  he  makes  the  acquaintance  of  Berthelot.  —  Receives  a  scientific 
mission  from  the  government  and  travels  for  eight  months  in  Italy  ('49) ;  his 
democratic  illusions  of  '48  disappear,  and  the  world  of  art  is  revealed  to  him.  — 
Meets  in  '50  his  sister  Henriette,  after  a  ten-years'  separation,  and  has  her  con- 
stant companionship  and  counsel  during  the  ten  years  following.  (See  Ma 
Sceur  Henriette,  p.  32  ff) .  —  Is  employed  in  the  department  of  Oriental  MSS. 
at  the  Bibliotheque  Nationale,  '51-'60.  —  Elected  to  the  Academic  des  Inscrip- 
tions, '56.  —  Marries  in  the  same  year  Mademoiselle  Scheffer,  niece  of  the 
painter  Ary  Scheffer.  —  Goes  on  a  scientific  mission  to  ancient  Phoenicia,  ac- 
companied by  his  sister,  '60.  —  They  both  fall  ill  of  fever  in  Syria,  and  Henri- 
ette dies,  '61.  —  Composes  during  his  Eastern  trip  his  Vie  de  Jesus.  —  Ap- 
pointed Professor  of  Hebrew  at  the  College  de  France  ('62),  but  the  government 
first  suspends  his  course,  because  of  his  unorthodox  attitude,  and  two  years  later 
deprives  him  of  his  professorship.  —  Unsuccessful  candidate  for  deputy  in  the 
electoral  district  of  Meaux,  '69.  —  Travels  with  Prince  Napoleon  in  Scandina- 
via, '70.  —  Reinstated  in  his  professorship  at  the  College  de  France  on  the  fall 
of  the  Empire,  '70.  —  Elected  to  the  Academy,  '78.  —  President  of  the  Asiatic 
Society,  '82.  —  Administrator  of  the  College  de  France,  '84.  —  After  a  long  ill- 
ness, borne  with  great  fortitude,  Renan  dies  in  his  apartment  at  the  College  de 
France,  October  2,  '92. 

L'Avenir  de  la  science,  1848  (published  in  '90). — Averroeset  V  Averrolsme  and 
De  philosophia  peripatetica  apud  Syros,  '52.  —  Histoire  generate  et  systeme 
compare  des  langues  semitiques,  '55.  —  Etudes  d'histoire  religieuse,  '57.  —  De 
I'origine  du  langage,  '58.  —  Essais  de  morale  et  de  critique,  '59.  —  Translations : 
Le  livre  de  Job,  '59;  Le  Cantique  des  cantiques,  '60.  —  Ma  Sasur  Henriette,  '62 
(published,  '95).  —  Vie  de  Jesus,  '63.  —  Various  contributions  to  the  Histoire 
litteraire  de  la  France,  vols.  xxiv  to  xxxi  (especially  the  Discours  sur  I'etat  des 
beaux-arts  en  France  au  XIVe  siecle,  in  vol.  xxiv).  —  Mission  de  Phenicie,  '64. 

—  Les  Apdtres,  '66. — Questions  contemporaines,  '68. — Saint-Paul,  '69.  — La 
reforme  intellectuelle  et  morale,  '71. — U Antichrist,  '73.  —  Dialogues  et  frag- 
ments philosophiques,   '76.  —  Les  Evangiles,   '77.  —  Melanges  d'histoire  et  de 
voyages,    '78. — L'eglise   chretienne,    '79.  —  Conferences    d'Angleterre,    '80. — 
M arc-Aurele,  '82.  —  Translation :    I'Ecclesiaste,  '82.  —  Souvenirs   d'enfance  et 
de  jeunesse,  '83.  —  Nouvelles   etudes    d'histoire   religieuse,  '84.  —  Discours  et 
conferences,  '87.  —  Histoire  du  peuple  d' Israel,  5  vols.,  '87-'94.  —  Drames  philo- 
sophiques, '88. — Feuilles  detachees,  '92. — Lettres  intimes,  '96.  —  Correspon- 
dence (between  Renan  and  Berthelot),  '98.  —  Cahiers  de  jeunesse,  '06.  — Nou- 
veaux  cahiers  de  jeunesse,  '07. 

See  Scherer,  Melanges  de  critique  religieuse,  '60;  Etudes  sur  la  litt.  contem- 
poraine,  iv,  vu,  vin,  ix,  and  x,  '63-'95;  Melanges  d'histoire  religieuse,  '64. 

—  Sainte-Beuve,  Nouveaux  lundis,  n,  '62 ;  vi,  '63.  —  Bourget,  Essais  de  psycho- 
logic contemporaine,  '83.  —  Lemaltre,  Les  Contemporains,  i,  '84 ;  iv,  '89.  —  7m- 
pressions  de  theatre,  i,  '89.  —  A.  France,  La  vie  litteraire,  i,  '89;  n,  '94.  —  E.  M. 
de  Vogil6,  Heures  d'histoire,  '93.  —  Pellissier,  Le  Mouvement  litteraire  au  XIXe 
siecle  (p.  314  ff),  '94.  —  G.  Monod,  Renan,  Taine  et  Michelet,  '94.  —  Seailles, 
Ernest   Renan,  '95.  —  F.  Espinaese,  Life  of  Renan,  95.  —  Brunetiere,  Nou- 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  413 

veaux  essais  sur  la  litt.  contemporaine,  '95;  Library  of  the  World's  Best  Literature, 
xxi,  '97. 

Renard  (Georges),  1847. 

Vie  de  Voltaire,  1883. — Etudes  sur  la  France  contemporaine,  '88. — Lea 
princes  de  la  jeune  critique,  '90.  —  Critique  de  combat,  3  vols.,  '94-'97. — La 
mlthode  scientifique  de  I'histoire  litteraire,  1900,  etc. 

Rigault  (Hippolyte),  1821-1858. 

La  querelle  des  Anciens  et  des  Modernes,  '56.  —  CEutres  completes,  4  vols.,  '59. 

Rod  (Edouard),  1857-1910.  Novelist,  etc. 

De  la  litt.  comparee,  1886.  — Etudes  sur  le  XI Xe  si&cle,  '88.  — Les  idles  mo- 
rales du  temps  present,  '91.  —  Dante,  '91.  — Stendhal,  '91.  — Essai  sur  Goethe, 
'98. — Nouvelles  etudes  sur  le  X I Xe  siecle,  '98. — L' Affaire  J.-J.  Rousseau, 
1906.  — La  Pensee  d'Edouard  Rod,  '11,  etc. 

Sacy  (Samuel-Ustazade-Silvestre  de),  1801-1879.  Contributor  of  lit- 
erary and  political  articles  to  Journal  des  Debats  from  1828.  —  Member  of  Aca- 
demy from  1854.  —  An  attractive  mixture  of  humanist  and  bibliophile. 

Varietls  litteraires,  morales  et  historiques,  2  vols.,  1858.  —  Rapport  sur  le 
progres  des  lettres,  par  de  Sacy,  Fetal,  Gautier,  et  Ed.  Thierry,  '68. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Causeries  du  lundi,  xrv,  1858.  —  Renan,  Essais  de  mor- 
ale et  de  critique,  '59.  —  Prevost-Paradol,  Essais  de  politique  et  de  litt.,  in,  '63. 
—  Taine,  Nouveaux  essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire,  '65;  Derniers  essais  de 
critique  et  d'histoire,  '94.  —  Scherer,  Etudes  critiques  sur  la  litt.  contemporaine, 
VH,  '82. 

Sainte-Beuve  (Charles- Augustin),  1804-1869.  Born  at  Boulogne-sur- 
Mer  two  months  after  the  death  of  his  father,  a  government  official,  who  at  the 
age  of  fifty-two  married  a  woman  of  forty  (English  on  her  mother's  side). — 
S.-B.  studies  at  B16riot  Institution  at  Boulogne.  —  In  1818  enters  the  Pension 
Landry  at  Paris.  —  Studies  medicine,  '23-'27.  —  Begins  to  write  for  Globe 
(founded  by  his  old  teacher,  M.  Dubois,  '24).  —  As  a  result  of  his  review  of 
Odes  et  Ballades  in  the  Globe  (Jan.,  '27)  gets  acquainted  with  Hugo.  —  Rehabi- 
litates Ronsard  and  the  Pleiade  as  a  part  of  his  pro-romantic  campaign.  —  Be- 
gins writing  for  Revue  de  Paris.  —  Has  close  relations  with  followers  of  Saint- 
Simon,  '30-'31.  —  Writes  for  National;  for  newly  founded  Revue  des  Deux 
Mondes.  —  Goes  to  Switzerland.  —  Meets  Vinet  and  lectures  at  Lausanne  on 
Port^Royal,  '37-'38.  —  Appointed  by  Cousin  to  a  position  in  the  Bibliotheque 
Mazarine,  '40.  —  Elected  to  Academy,  '44.  —  Leaves  Paris  after  the  Revolu- 
tion of  '48  and  spends  a  year  as  professor  of  French  literature  at  Liege,  Bel- 
gium. (For  circumstances  see  preface  to  his  Chateaubriand.)  —  On  return  to 
Paris  (Sept. ,  '49) ,  begins  his  Lundis  in  the  Constitutional.  —  Passes  over  to  the 
Moniteur,  '53.  —  Appointed  professor  of  Latin  poetry  at  the  College  de  France, 
'54;  but  is  prevented  by  students,  incensed  at  his  political  attitude,  from  giv- 
ing more  than  two  lectures.  —  Lectures  at  the  Normal  School,  '58-'61.  —  Re- 
turns to  the  Constitutionnel  and  begins  the  Nouveaux  lundis,  '61. — Appointed 
senator,  '65. 

Tableau  historique  et  critique  de  la  poesie  fr.  et  du  theatre  fr.  au  XVIe  siecle, 
1828  (definitive  ed.,  '76) .  —  (Euvres  choisies  de  Pierre  de  Ronsard  avec  notices, 
notes,  et  commentaires,  '28.  —  Vie,  poesie  et  pensees  de  Joseph  Delorme,  '29.  — 
Les  Consolations,  '30.  —  Voluptl,  2  vols.,  '34.  —  Pensees  d  'Aout,  '37.  —  Port- 
Royal,  5  vols.,  '40-'59  (3d  ed.,  7  vols.,  '69-'71).  — Livre  d'amour,  '43.  — Cau- 
series du  lundi,  16  vola.,  '61-'62  (3d  ed.,  revised,  '57-72).  — Etude  sur  VirgiU, 


414  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

'57  (revised  ed.,  '70).  —  Chateaubriand  et  son  groupe  litteraire  sous  I 'Empire, 
2  vols.,  '60  (revised  ed.,  '73).  —  Portraits  litteraires,  3  vols.,  '62-'64.  —  Nou- 
veaux  lundis,  13  vols.,  '63-70  (2d  ed.,  revised,  '64-'78.)  —  Portraits  contempo- 
rains,  5  vols.,  '69-'71.  —  Portraits  de  femmes,  '70.  —  P.-J.  Proudhon,  sa  vie  et 
sa  correspondance,  '72.  — Lettres  it  la  princesse,  '73.  —  Premiers  lundis,  3  vols., 
'74-'75.  —  Cahiers  de  Sainte-Beuve,  '76.  —  Chroniques  parisiennes,  '76.  —  Cor- 
respondance de  Sainte-Beuve,  2  vols.,  '77-'78.  —  Nouvette  Correspondance,  '80. 

—  Lettres  inedites  de  Sainte-Beuve  &  Collombet,  1903.  —  Correspondance  in^ditt 
de  Sainte-Beuve  avec  M.  et  Mme.  Juste  Olivier,  '04.  — Lettres  de  Sainte-Beuve  A 
Victor  Hugo  et  a  Mme.  Victor  Hugo,  Revue  de  Paris,  Dec.,  Jan.  and  Feb.,  '05. 

—  Lettres  inedites  A  Charles Labitte,  '12. 

See  Scherer, Etudes  sur  la  lilt,  contemporaine,  1, 1863;  rv,  '73;  vii,  '82.  —  Haus- 
sonville,  Sainte-Beuve,  sa  vie  et  ses  aeuvres,  '75.  —  Levallois,  Sainte-Beuve,  '72. 

—  Troubat,  Souvenirs  et  Indiscretions  du  dernier  secretaire  de  Sainte-Beuve,  '72; 
Vie  de  Sainte-Beuve,  '76;  Souvenirs  du  dernier  secretaire  de  Sainte-Beuve,  '90. 

—  M.    Arnold,   in    Encyclopaedia   Britannica.  —  Brunetiere,   L'evolution  des 
genres,  '90.  —  Taine,  Derniers  essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire,  '94.  —  Faguet,  Po- 
litiques  et  Moralistes  du  XIXe  siecle,  3d  series,  '99.  —  Spoelberch  de  Loven- 
joul,  Sainte-Beuve  inconnu,   1901.  —  Giraud,  Table  alphabetique  et  analytique 
des  Premiers  lundis,  etc.,  avec  une  Itude  sur  Sainte-Beuve  et  son  cnivre  critique,  '03. 

—  Michaut,  Sainte-Beuve  avant  les  Lundis,  '03;  Le  Livre  d' Amour  de  Sainte- 
Beuve,   '05;  Etudes  sur   Sainte-Beuve,  '05.  —  S6ch£,  Etudes  d'histoire   roman- 
tique:  Sainte-Beuve,  2  vols.,  '04.  —  G.  M.  Harper,  Sainte-Beuve,  '09.  —  P.  E. 
More,  Shelburne  Essays,  3d  series,  '06.  —  F.  Voizard,  Sainte-Beuve:  L'homme  et 
I'ceuvre,  '12. 

Saint-Marc  Girardin,  1801-1873.  Exercised  a  wide  influence  as  professor 
of  French  poetry  at  the  Sorbonne  from  1834.  —  Member  of  Academy  from 
1844.  —  A  keen  and  witty  opponent  of  romantic  extravagance ;  a  moralist  even 
more  than  a  literary  critic.  He  has  been  accused  of  having  a  somewhat  bour- 
geois mental  habit,  and  of  being  a  brilliant  improviser  even  more  than  a  born 
writer  (an  "  ecrivain  de  race  "  as  the  French  say). 

Eloge  de  Lesage,  1822.  — Eloge  de  Bossuet,  '27.  —  Tableau  de  la  litt.  fr.  au 
XVIe  siecle,  '28.  —  Notices  litteraires  et  politiques  sur  I'Allemagne,  '34.  —  Cours  de 
litt.  dramatique,  4  vols.,  '43.  —  Essais  de  litt.  et  de  morale,  2  vols.,  '45.  — Souvenirs 
de  voyages  etd'etudes,  2  vols.,  '52-'53.  — La  Fontaine  et  les  fabulistes,  2  vols.,  '67. 

—  J.-J.  Rousseau,  sa  vie  et  ses  ouvrages,  2  vols.,  '70. 

See  Vinet,  Etudes  sur  la  litt.  fr.,  in,  1851.  —  Nisard,  Etudes  de  critique  lit- 
teraire, '58;  Portraits  et  etudes  d'histoire  litteraire,  '74;  Souvenirs  et  notes  bio- 
graphiques,  '88. 

Saint-Victor  (le  comte  Paul  de),  1827-1881.  A  romanticist  whose  style 
was  admired  by  Taine  and  others  for  its  warmth  of  coloring,  a  merit  that  does 
not  compensate  for  its  lack  of  intellectual  content. 

Hommes  et  dieux,  1867.  — Les  femmes  de  Goethe,  '69.  — Lamartine,  '69.  — 
Victor  Hugo,  '85.  —  Anciens  et  modernes,  '86.  — Le  theatre  contemporain,  '89. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Nouveaux  lundis,  x,  1867.  —  Scherer,  Etudes  critiques  sur 
la  litt.  contemporaine,  rv,  '73;  vn,  '82.  —  Taine,  Derniers  essais  de  critique  et 
d'histoire,  '94. 

Sand  (George),  1804-1876.  For  her  critical  views  see  her  Souvenirs  et  impres- 
sions litteraires,  1862. —  Impressions  et  Souvenirs,  '73. —  Questions  d' art  et  de  litt., 
'78.  — Correspondance,  6  vols.,  '82-84  (especially  the  letters  to  Flaubert),  etc. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  415 

Sarcey  (Trancisque) ,  1828-1899.  The  most  influential  dramatic  critic  of 
his  time.  Writer  for  the  Temps  newspaper  from  1867.  A  technician  and  advo- 
cate of  bourgeois  good  sense. 

Comediens  et  comediennes,  '78.  —  Souvenirs  de  jeunesse,  '84.  —  Souvenirs 
Q'dge  mur,  '92.  —  Quarante  aus  de  thedtre,  8  vols.,  1900-'02,  etc. 

See  Lemaitre,  Lea  Contemporaina,  n,  '89.  —  Faguet,  Propos  de  thedtre,  '03. 

Sayous  (Andre),  1808-1870. 

Etude  litteraire  sur  Calvin,  1839.  — Etudes  litteraires  sur  les  ecrivains  Jr.  de 
la  Reformation,  2  vols.,  '42.  — Histoire  de  la  lift.  fr.  a  I'etranger,  2  vols.,  '53. — 
Le  XVIII"  siede  d.  I'etranger,  2  vols.,  '61. 

See  Vinet,  Etudes  sur  la  litt.  fr.,  in,  1851.  —  S.  de  Sacy,  Varietes  litteraires,  i, 
n,  '58.  —  Sainte-Beuve,  Causeries  du  lundi,  xv,  '61. 

Scherer,  (Edmond),  1815-1889.  Born  at  Paris  of  Swiss,  Dutch  and  Eng- 
lish ancestry.  —  Boards  at  Monmouth,  England,  with  an  evangelical  clergy- 
man from  Aug.  10, 1831.  —  Returns  to  Paris,  '33.  —  Theological  student  Stras- 
bourg, *36-'39.  —  Teaches  at  Ecole  libre  de  Theologie,  Geneva.  —  Resigns  from 
the  School,  Dec.,  '49.  —  Gives  independent  courses  on  theology  at  Geneva, 
'50-'59.  —  Leaves  for  Paris,  '60.  —  Joins  the  staff  of  the  Temps  newspaper,  for 
which  it  is  estimated  he  wrote  3500  articles.  —  Elected  member  of  National 
Assembly,  '71.  —  Elected  to  Senate,  '75. 

Dogmatique  de  Vecole  reformee,  1843.  —  De  I'etat  actuel  de  Veglise  reformee  en 
France,  '44.  — Esquisse  d'une  theorie  de  I'eglise  chretienne,  '45.  — La  critique  et 
lafoi,  '50.  —  Alex.  Vinet,  '53.  — Lettres  d,  mon  cure,  '53.  —  Melanges  de  critique 
religieuse,  '60. — Etudes  critiques  sur  la  litt.  contemporaine,  10  vols.,  '63-'96. 
—  Melanges  d'histoire  religieuse,  '64.  — Diderot,  '80.  — La  revision  de  la  con- 
stitution, '81. — La  democratic  et  la  France,'83. — Melchior  Grimm,  '87. — Etudes 
sur  la  litt.  an  XVIII'  siede,  '91. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Causeries  du  lundi,  xv,  1860.  —  Greard,  Ed.  Scherer,  '90.  — 
Tissot,  Les  evolutions  de  la  critique,  '90.  —  Dowden,  New  Studies  in  Literature, 
'95.  —  Boutmy,  Taine,  Scherer,  Laboulaye,  1901. 

Seche  (Leon),  1848.   Ultra-biographical  in  his  point  of  view. 

Port-Royal  des  Champs,  1899.  —  Volney  (1757-1820},  '99. — Sainte-Beuve, 
2  vols.,  1904-05.  —  A.  de  Mussel,  '07.  — Le  Cenacle  de  la  "  Muse  francaise," 
'08.  —  Hortense  Allart  de  Meritens,  '08.  — Le  Roman  de  Lamartine,  '09.  — 
Madame  d' Arbouville,  '09.  —  Muses  romantiques,  '10. — La  Jeunesse  dor ee 
sous  Louis  Philippe,  '11.  — Le  Cenacle  de  Joseph  Delorme,  2  vols.,  '12,  etc. 

Seilliere  (Ernest),  1866.  Is  developing  the  relationship  between  the  ex- 
pansive, romantic  attitude  towards  life  and  imperialism  (La  Philosophic  de 
I'imp6rialisme) . 

Etudes  sur  Ferdinand  Lassalle,  1897.  — Litt.  et  morale  dans  le  parti  socialiste 
allemand,  '98.  — Le  comte  deGobineau  et  I'aryanisme  historique,  1903. — Apol- 
lon  ou  Dionysosf  '05.  — L'imperialisme  democratique,  '07.  — Le  mal  romanlique. 
Essai  sur  Vimperialisme  irrationnel,  '08.  —  Une  tragedie  d'amour  au  temps  du 
romantisme,  '09.  —  Introduction  a  la  philosophic  de  Vimperialisme,  '10.  — 
Barbey  d'Aurevilly,  '10. — Les  mystiques  du  neo-romantisme,  '11.  — Schopenhauer, 
'11,  etc. 

Simonde  de  Sismondi  (Jean-Charles-Leonard),  1773-1842.  Historian, 
etc. ;  an  intimate  of  Madame  de  Stael's.  —  His  work  De  la  litt.  du  Midi  de  fEu- 
rope  (4  vols.,  1813)  is  an  underlying  influence  on  the  romantic  movement.  Like 
Madame  de  Stael  he  has  little  sense  of  form. 


416  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

See  Sainte-Beuve;  Nowceaux  lundis,  vi,"  1863.  —  SchererJ  Eludes  critiques 
sur  la  litt.  contemporaine,  n,  '65. 

Stael,  Mme.  de  (nee  Oermaine  Necker),  1766-1817.  Only  child  of 
rich  Swiss  banker,  Necker,  minister  of  Louis  XVI,  etc.  —  Meets  in  her  mo- 
ther's drawing-room  La  Harpe,  Buffon,  etc.  Marries  Baron  de  Stael,  Swedish 
Ambassador  at  Paris,  1786.  —  Joins  Talleyrand  and  other  friends  in  England 
during  the  Revolution.  —  Meets  Benjamin  Constant,  Sept.,  '94.  —  Opens 
salon  at  Paris,  May,  '95,  but  returns  to  Coppet  same  year.  —  Opens  salon 
again,  April,  '97.  —  Enters  into  opposition  to  Napoleon.  —  Death  of  Baron  de 
Stael,  '02.  —  Receives  order  to  keep  at  a  distance  of  forty  leagues  from  Paris, 
Oct.,  1803.  —  Leaves  for  Germany  (at  Weimar  from  Dec.,  '03,  to  Feb.,  '04). 
Appoints  A.  W.  Schlegel  tutor  to  her  son,  '04.  —  Returns  in  haste  from  Ger- 
many on  learning  of  the  death  of  her  father.  —  Sets  out  for  Italy,  Nov.,  '04.  — 
Spends  winter  '07- '08  at  Munich  and  Vienna.  —  Confiscation  of  French  edi- 
tion of  the  Germany,  '10  (printed  at  London,  '13,  and  at  Leipzig,  '14). — 
Marries  Genevan  officer  of  twenty-three,  named  de  Rocca,  '11.  —  Persecuted 
by  Napoleon,  she  flees  from  Coppet,  May  22,  '12.  —  Reaches  Russia  by  way  of 
Vienna  and  Warsaw.  —  Visits  Sweden  and  later  England  (June, '13). — 
Stricken  with  paralysis  at  a  ball,  Feb.,  '17,  and  dies  July  14,  of  the  same  year. 

Lettres  sur  le  caractere  et  les  Merits  de  J.-J.  Rousseau,  1788.  — Essai  sur  lea  fic- 
tions, '95.  —  De  Vinfluence  des  passions  sur  le  bonheur  des  individus  et  des  na- 
tions, '96.  —  De  la  litt.  consideree  dans  ses  rapports  avec  les  institutions  sociales, 
2  vols.,  1800.  —  Delphine,  4  vols.,  '02. — Corinne,  3  vols.,  '07.  —  De  I'Alle- 
magne,  3  vols.,  '10.  —  Reflexions  sur  le  suicide,  '13.  —  Considerations  sur  la 
Revolution  fr.,  3  vols.,  '18.  —  Dix  annies  d'exil,  '21. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  de  femmes,  1835.  —  Brandes,  Emigrant  litera- 
ture, '82.  —  Lady  Blennerhassett,  F ran  von  Stael  (French  and  English  trans- 
lations), '87.  —  Pellissier,  Le  mouvement  litt&raire  au  XIXe  siecle,  '89.  — 
Brunetiere,  Etudes  de  critique  sur  la  litt.  fr.,  iv,  '90.;  L 'evolution  des  genres,  '90.; 
IS  evolution  de  la  poesie  lyrique,  '95.  —  Dejob,  Mme.  de  Stael  et  I' Italic,  "90.  — 
Sorel,  Mme.  de  Stael,  '90.  —  Faguet,  Politiques  et  moralistes  du  XIXe  siecle, 
i,  '91.  —  Doumic,  Hommes  et  idees  du  XIXe  siecle,  1903. 

Stapfer  (Paul),  1840. 

Petite  comedie  de  la  critique  litteraire,  ou  Moliere  selon  les  trois  icoles  philo- 
sophiques,  1865.  — Laurence  Sterne,  '70.  —  Les  artistes  juges  et  parties,  '72. — 
Shakespeare  et  I'antiquite,  2  vols.,  '79.  — Etudes  sur  la  litt.  fr.  moderne  et  con- 
temporaine, '80.  —  Moliere  et  Shakespeare,  '80.  —  Goethe  et  ses  deux  chefs-d'oeuvre 
classiques,  '81.  —  Varietes  litteraires  et  morales,  '81.  —  Racine  et  V.  Hugo,  '86. 
—  Rabelais,  '89. — Les  reputations  litteraires,  '93. — Montaigne,  '94. — La 
famille  et  les  amis  de  Montaigne,  '95.  —  La  grande  predication  chretienne  en 
France,  '98.  —  Paradoxes  et  truismes  d"un  ancien  doyen,  1904.  —  Humour  et 
humoristes,  '11,  etc. 

Stendhal  (Henri  Beyle),  1783-1842.  Important  as  an  underlying  influ- 
ence on  writers  like  Taine  and  Bourget  rather  than  for  his  specific  opinions  on 
literature.  His  definition  of  romanticism  in  Racine  et  Shakespeare  is  impossible. 
It  would  follow  from  this  definition,  as  M.  Faguet  points  out,  that  the  most  un- 
romantic  of  writers  are  the  romanticists  of  1830.  The  argument  against  the 
unities  in  the  same  book  coincides  with  that  of  Dr.  Johnson  in  his  Preface  to 
Shakespeare. 

Racine  et  Shakespeare,  1823.  —  Melanges  d'art  et  de  litt.,  '67,  etc. 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  417 

See  A.  Paupe,  Hist.  des  ceuvres  6.e  Stendhal,  1904.  —  J.  Melia.Lcs  Idees  de 
Stendhal,  '10. 

Taillandier  (Ren6-Gaspard-Ernest),  known  as  Saint-Ren6  Taillandier, 
1817-79.  Contributed  articles  for  many  years,  chiefly  on  foreign  literatures, 
to  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes. 

Novalis,  1847.  —  Histoire  de  la  jeune  AUemagne.  Etudes  litteraires,  '49.  — 
Poete  du  Caucase :  Michel  Lermontoff,  '56.  — Litt.  etrangere,  '61.  — Lettres  in- 
edites  de  J.  C.  S.  de  Sismondi,  '63.  —  Comeille  et  ses  contemporains,  '64.  — 
Drames  et  romans  de  la  vie  litteraire,  '70.  —  Introduction  aux  fables  de  La  Fon- 
taine, '73.  — Lea  destinies  de  la  nouvette  poesie  provenfole,  '76.  — Etudes  litte- 
raires, '81,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Nouveaux  lundis,  v,  1863.  —  Montegut,  Nos  marts  con- 
temporains,  '89. 

Taine  (Hippolyte-Adolphe),  1828-1893.  Studies  at  College  Bourbon  and 
Ecole  normale,  1841-'51.  —  Incurs  displeasure  of  Government  because  of  his 
determinist  doctrines,  and  is  forced  to  give  up  his  position  as  teacher  in  Lycee 
at  Poitiers,  '52.  —  Receives  doctor's  degree,  '53.  —  Attains  notoriety  by  his 
attack  in  Philosophes  francais  au  XIXe  siecle  on  the  official  philosophy  of 
Cousin,  '57.  —  Becomes  professor  at  Ecole  des  beaux-arts,  '64.  —  Marriage, 
'68.  —  Lectures  at  Oxford,  '71.  —  Elected  to  the  Academy,  '78. 

De  Personis  platonicis  and  Essai  sur  les  fables  de  La  Fontaine,  theses  presented 
for  doctorate,  1853  (the  latter  recast  and  published  under  the  title  La  Fontaine 
et  ses  fables,  '60).  —  Voyage  aux  Pyrenees,  '55.  — Essai  sur  Tite-Live,  '56. — 
Philosophes  franc/iis  au  XIXe  siecle,  '57  (revised  edition  under  title  Les  philo- 
sophes  classiques  au  XIXe  siecle  en  France,  '68).  — Essais  de  critique  et  d'his- 
toire,  '58.  —  Histoire  de  la  litterature  anglaise,  5  vols.,  '63-'67.  —  Nouveaux 
essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire,  '65.  —  Voyage  en  Italic,  2  vols.,  '66.  —  Philoso- 
phic del' art,  '65;  Philosophic  de  V  art  en  Italic,  '66;  V I  deal  dans  V  art,  '67;  Philo- 
sophic de  I'art  dans  les  Pays-Bos,  '68;  Philosophic  de  I' art  en  Grece,  '69  (last  five 
volumes  united  into  two,  under  general  title,  Philosophic  de  I'art,  '80). —  Vie 
et  opinions  de  Thomas  Graindorge,  '68.  —  De  I' intelligence,  2  vols.,  '70.  —  Du  Suf- 
frage universal,  '71.  —  Notes  sur  I' Angleterre,  '72. —  Un  sejour  en  France, 
1792-1795,  '72. —  Origines  de  la  France  contemporaine,  6  vols.,  '76-'93. — 
Derniers  essais  de  critique  et  d'histoire,  '94.  —  Garnet  de  voyage,  '96.  —  Vie  et  cor- 
respondance,  4  vols.,  1903-'07. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Causeries  du  lundi,  xm,  1857;  Nouveaux  lundis,  vm, 
'64.  —  Scherer,  Melanges  de  critique  religieuse,  '58;  Etudes,  iv,  '66;  vi,  vn, 
'78;  vm,  '84.  —  Mont4gut,  Essais  sur  la  litt.  anglaise,  '63.  —  Caro,  L'Idee  de 
Dieu  et  ses  nouveaux  critiques,  '64.  —  Bourget,  Essais  de  psychologic  contem- 
poraine, '83.  —  Hennequin,  La  critique  scientifique,  '88.  —  Brunetiere,  L'evolu- 
tion  de  la  critique,  '90.  —  Monod,  Renan,  Taine  et  Michelet,  '94.  —  A.  de  Mar- 
gerie,  H.  Taine,  '94.  —  G.  Barzellotti,  Ippolito  Taine,  '95  (French  translation 
by  Dietrich,  1901).  —  Pellissier,  Nouveaux  essais  de  litt.  contemporaine,  '95.  — 
Giraud,  Essai  sur  Taine,  1901 ;  Bibliographic  des  asuvres  de  Taine,  '02.  — 
Aulard,  Taine  historien  de  la  Revolution,  '07. 

Texte  (Joseph),  1865-1900. 

J.-J.  Rousseau  et  les  origines  du  cosmopolitisme  litteraire,  '95.  —  Etudes  de 
litt.  europeenne,  '98. 

Veuillot  (Louis),  1813-1883.  A  writer  who  put  an  extraordinary  gift  for 
expression  (manifested  especially  in  satire  and  invective)  into  the  service  of  a 


418  LIST  OF  CRITICS 

very    ultramontane    type  of  Catholicism.    His  organ  was  the  newspaper 
L'Univers  (suppressed,  1860-'67). 

Melanges  religieux,   historiques,  politiques  et    litteraires,  18  vols.,  1856-'75. 

—  Les  odeurs  de  Paris,  '66.  —  Moliere  et Bourdaloue,  '77.  — Etudes  sur  V.  Hugo, 
'85,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Nouveaux  lundis,  i,  1861.  —  Scherer,  Etudes,  i  '63.;  iv,  '74. 

—  Lemaitre,  Les  contemporains,  6e  serie,  '96. 

Villemain  (Abel-Francois),  1790-1870.  Maltre  de  conf6rences  at  Normal 
School,  1810.  — Professor  at  the  Sorbonne  from  '16.  —  Succeeds  Fontanes  at 
Academy,  '21. — Becomes  active  politically. — Villele  Ministry  suspends  his 
course  at  the  Sorbonne,  '21. — Prominent  politically  during  July  Monarchy.  — 
Minister  of  Education,  '39-'44. 

Eloge  de  Montaigne,  1812.  —  Choix  d'oraisons  funebres,  '13. — Discours  sur 
les  avantages  et  les  inconvenients  de  la  critique,  '14.  — Eloge  de  Montesquieu,  '16. 

—  Essai  sur  Zea  romanciers  grecs,  '22.  —  Discours  et  melanges  liiteraires,   '23. 
Nouoeaux  melanges  historiques  et  litteraires,  27. —  Cours  de  litt.  fr.,  6  vols.,  '28. 

—  Considerations  sur  la  langue  fr.,  '35.  —  (Euvres,  10  vols.,  '40-'49.  —  Cours  de 
litt.  fr. :  Le  tableau  de  la  litt.  fr.  au  XVI I Ie  siecle  et  du  moyen-dge  en  France,  en 
Italie,  en  Espagne  et  en  Angleterre,  6  vols.,  '40-'46.  — Etudes  de  litt.  ancienne  et 
etrangere,  '46.  —  Discours  et  melanges  litteraires,  '46.  — Tableau  de  I 'eloquence 
chretienne  au  IVe  siecle,  49.  — Souvenirs  contemporains  d'histoire  et  de  litt.,  2 
vols.,  '53-'55. — Choix  d" 'etudes  sur  la  litt.  contemporaine,  '57. — La  tribune 
moderne,  '58.  —  Essai  sur  le  genie  de  Pindare  et  sur  la  poesie  lyrique,  '59,  etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  contemporains,  n,  '36.  —  Causeries  du  lundi,  i, 
'49;  vi,  '52.  —  Nisard,  Etudes  d'histoire  et  de  litt.,  '59.  —  Renan,  Discours  et 
conferences,  '87.  —  Brunetiere,  L'evolution  de  la  critique,  '90. 

Vinet  (Alexandre-Rodolphe),  1797-1847.  Professor  of  French  literature 
at  Basle  from  1817-37;  professor  of  theology  at  Lausanne,  '37-'45.  —  A  mor- 
alist and  critic  of  rare  insight  and  elevation.  —  Exercised  a  marked  influence 
on  men  so  different  as  Matthew  Arnold,  Sainte-Beuve,  Scherer,  Brunetiere, 
etc.  —  The  form  of  his  work  is  inferior  to  the  substance,  an  inferiority  that 
may  militate  against  its  survival.  "  Le  style,"  says  Sainte-Beuve,  "  est  un 
sceptre  d'or  a  qui  reste,  en  definitive,  le  royaume  de  ce  monde." 

Chrestomathie  fr.,  3  vols.,  1829. — Etudes  sur  Pascal,  '47.  — Etudes  sur  la  litt. 
fr.  au  XIXe  siecle,  3  vols.,  '49  (vol.  I,  of  a  new  and  more  complete  ed.,  '12). 

—  Histoire  litteraire  fr.  au  XVIII'  si&cle,  2  vols.,  '53.  —  Moralistes  des  XVIe- 
XVIIe  siecles,  '59.  — Esprit  ffAlex.  Vinet,  2  vols.,  '61.  —  Poetes  du  siecle  de 

Louis  XIV,  '62.  —  Melanges,  '69. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  contemporains,  in,  1837;  Portraits  litteraires, 
in,  '47.  —  Scherer,  A.  Vinet.  Notice  sur  sa  vie  et  ses  ecrits,  '53;  Etudes,  i, 
'63.  —  Rambert,  A.  Vinet,  sa  vie  et  son  aeuvre,  '75. —  Brunetiere,  Essais  sur 
la  litt.  contemporaine,  '92. 

Vitet  (Ludovic),  1802-1873.  Literary  critic  on  Globe  from  1824.  Later 
distinguished  himself  as  art  critic. 

Essais  historiques  et  litteraires,  1862.  —  Etudes  philosophiques  et  litteraires,  '74, 
etc. 

See  Sainte-Beuve,  Portraits  litteraires,  in,  1846. 

Weiss  (J.-J.),  1827-1891.  An  unsystematic  critic,  but  conservative  in  his 
general  instincts.  He  had  a  marked  gift  for  epigram.  The  title  of  an  article 


LIST  OF  CRITICS  419 

he  published  in  the  Revue  contemporaine  in  1858  ( La  Litterature  brutale)  gave 
a  phrase  to  criticism. 

Essai  sur  Hermann  et  DorotMe,  1856.  —  Essai  BUT  Vhistoire  de  la  litt.  fr. ,  '65.  — 
Au  pays  du  Rhin,  '86.  — Le  thedtre  et  les  mceurs,  '89.  —  Autour  de  la  Comidie 
FT.,  '92.  —  Sur  Goethe,  '92.  — Le  drame  historique  et  le  drome  passionnel,  "94.  — 
Trois  annees  de  thedtre  (1883-85),  4  vols.,  '92-'96. 

See  Lemaltre,  Impressions  de  tMdtre,  vn,  '91.  —  De  Vogue,  Regards  his- 
torigues  et  litteraires,  '91.  —  Doumic,  Portraits  d'ecrivains,  '92.  —  France,  La 
vie  litteraire,  iv,  '92.  —  Pellissier,  Essais  sur  la  litt.  contemporaine,  '93.  —  E. 
Lovinesco,  J.-J.  Weiss,  1909.  —  G.  Stirbey,  J.-J.  Weiss,  '11. 

Wyzewa  (T.  de),  1862.  Has  for  many  years  contributed  articles  on  foreign 
literatures  and  art  to  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes. 

Nos  mattres,  1895.  — Ecrivains  Grangers,  3  vols.,'96-'99,  etc. 

Zola  (Emile),  1840-1903.  Defends  for  the  most  part  in  his  critical  writing 
his  own  conception  of  the  novel  (a  conception  that  involves  a  radical  confusion 
of  the  genres). 

Mes  haines,  1866.  — Le  roman  experimental,  '80.  — Le  naturalisme  au  thedtre, 
'81.  —  Noa  auteurs  dramatiques,  '81.  — Lea  romanciera  naturalistes,  '81.  — 
Documents  litteraires,  '81. 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


Adams,  John,  244. 

Addison,  157. 

^Elian,  351. 

^schylus,  166. 

Agathon,  385  n. 

Albany,  Countess  of,  110. 

Alexander,  215. 

Amiel,  52  n.,  197,  198,  287,  391. 

Ampere,  J.-J.,  94, 95, 172. 

Anne,  Queen,  159. 

Aquinas,  Saint  Thomas,  188,  317. 

Aristophanes,  346. 

Aristotle,  25,  52,  54,  57,  126,  227,  303, 

326,  352  n.,  365,  371,  372,  373,  381. 
Arnauld,  154. 
Arnold,  Matthew,  vii,  35,  52  n.,  66  n., 

104,  197,  198,  199, 213,  248, 272, 362, 

387  n. 
Augustine,  Saint,  167,  367,  370  n. 

Bacon,  236,  337. 

Balzac,  Guez  de,  154.. 

Balzac,  Honore"  de,  29, 50, 107, 137, 179, 

181, 182,  220,  221,  223,  229,  301r306, 

332,  333. 

Barbe,  Abbe"  Eustache,  103,  104. 
Barres  Maurice,  291,  368  n. 
Baudelaire,  119,  209,  210,  212. 
Bayle,  Pierre,  112,  121,  122,  123, 124, 

125,  126,  127,  131,  132,  316. 
Beaumont,  Mme.  de,  43. 
Beethoven,  234. 
Be-ranger,  104,  105,  173,  279. 
Bergson,  Henri,  vii,  viii,  ix,  x,  53,  54, 

55,  56,  231,  252,  253,  375. 
Berthelot,  Marcellin,  275, 287,  306, 309. 
Bertin,  Edouard,  242. 
Bismarck,  27. 
Blackmore,  352. 
Boileau,  3,  24,  63  n.,  65,  88,  93  n.,  126, 

127,  137, 172, 182,  183,  229,  244,  254, 

303,  325,  338,  340,  380,  381,  389. 
Bossuet,  57,  74,  89,  93,  229,  330,  331. 
Boswell,  349. 
Bouhours,  Father,  348. 
Bourget,  Paul,  239,  288, 343, 344, 368  n. 
Bowles,  Samuel,  61,  65. 


Browne,  Sir  Thomas,  310. 

Brownell,  W.  C.,  355. 

Brunetiere,  85, 87, 88, 89, 94, 141, 191  n., 

298-337,  345  n.,  350,  381. 
Buddha,  55,  369,  370,  371. 
Burke,  339, 347,  360. 
Burns,  302. 
Byron,  2,  60,  61,  63,  64,  65,  81,  82, 302. 

Caesar,  134. 

Calderon,  23. 

Calvin,  32,  299. 

Camoens,  23. 

Canova,  154. 

Carlyle,  13,  21  n.,  198  n.,  258. 

Catullus,  116. 

Cervantes,  163,  254 

Chamfort,  158. 

Chapman,  302. 

Charlemagne,  215. 

Chateaubriand,  1,  5,  35,  41,  42,  43,  48, 

49, 52  n.,  6O-78,  79,  82,  96, 104, 107, 

118, 136,  138, 145,  154,  159,  160, 166, 

269,  270,  271,  278, 294, 302,  307, 308, 

316. 

ChStenay,  Mme.  de,  37. 
Chenier,  Andre",  308. 
Childeric,  77. 
Christ,  26,  27  (Jesus),  241,  271,  272, 

273,  275,  276,  286. 
Cicero,  57, 114,  134. 
Clovis,  77. 
Colbert,  229. 

Coleridge,  13,  37,  66  n.,  245. 
Colte,  172. 
Collignon,  A.,  114. 
Comte,  Auguste,   195,  224,  304,  331, 

334. 

Confalonieri,  32  n. 
Conrad,  121,  122. 
Conrart,  85. 

Constant,  Benjamin,  81. 
Corneille,  Pierre,  38,  57,  153,  185,  249. 
Corneille,  Thomas,  249. 
Coulmann,  163. 
Cousin,  82,  83,  84,  85,  87,  95,  96, 107, 

141,  174. 


424 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


Crabbe,  118. 
Crebillon,  1,  179. 
Croce,  Benedetto,  50,  53. 
Cuvier,  145,  325. 

Dante,  68,  78,  126,  161,  347,  373,  387. 

Danton,  134  n. 

Darwin,  216,  317,  325,  326,  334. 

D'Assoucy,  126. 

Daunou,  99,  102. 

Davidson,  Thomas,  355  n. 

Delille,  Abbe",  51. 

De  Quincey,  172. 

Descartes,  93,  176,  226,  236. 

Deschamps,  Emile,  63  n. 

Diderot,  39,  68. 

Doudan,  206,  271  n. 

Dreyfus,  300,  315,  319. 

Dubois,  100. 

Dugard,  Mme.,  357  n. 

Du  Guet,  148,  152. 

Dassault,  67  n. 

Eckermann,  363,  367  n.,  370  n. 

Edwards,  Jonathan,  357,  358,  362,  367. 

Emerson,  23,  35,  37,  40,  52,  54,  56, 114, 
150, 161,  165,  172,  174,  186,246,252, 
261,  263,  264,  277,  280,  300,  345, 
346,  351,  353,  354,  355, 356, 357, 358, 
359,  360, 361, 362,  364,  366,  368,372, 
374,  375,  381,  388,  389,  390,  391, 
392. 

Epictetus,  376. 

Epicurus,  120,  357. 

Euripides,  75. 

Fagon,  159. 

Faguet,  Emile,  60,  72,  121,  122,  126, 
244,  292,  336. 

Fauriel,  33,  99. 

F4nelon,  316. 

Fichte,  13,  31. 

Fielding,  171. 

Flaubert,  140,  255  n.,  307. 

Fleury,  272. 

Fontanes,  38  n.,  41,  42,  63,  65. 

Fontenelle,  172. 

France,  Anatole,  57,  150, 188,  289,  290, 
305,  306,  311,  312,  314,  316-324, 
326,  330,  345,  347, 349,  351. 

Francis,  Saint,  322. 

Franck, 123. 

Franklin,  Benjamin,  113. 

Fromentin,  206. 


Garat,  176. 

Gautier,  45,  191,  209,  227,  295,  302, 
308,  348,  377. 

Geoffroy,  3,  4. 

Gibbon,  339. 

Gluck,  176. 

Goethe,  2,  20,  21,  65,  72, 73,  80,  81,  88, 
95,  127,  137,  142,  162,  171,  174,  213, 
214,  239,  242,  265,  291,  306,312,  341, 
353,  361,  363, 364, 365,  366, 367,  368, 
370,  371, 372,  373, 374, 377,  378, 379, 
381. 

Gonconrt,  the  brothers,  105,  123,  140, 
190,  191,  (Edmond)  306, 307. 

Gorgias,  290. 

Gray,  143,  144. 

Greard,  192,  197,  202,  322. 

Green,  John  Richard,  342. 

Grillparzer,  30. 

Guizot,  82,  83,  87,  96,  154,  225, 226. 

Haeckel,  325. 

Hamilton,  144,  160. 

Harnack,  Otto,  367  n. 

Harrison,  J.  S.,  355  n. 

Haussonville,  Comte  d',  100. 

Hauvette,  Henri,  301  n. 

Haywood,  170. 

Hazlitt,  52,  170. 

Hegel,  83,  120,  192,  193,  216,  224,  225, 

281  n.,  317. 
Heine,  12,  13,  341. 
Herder,  22,  33,  281  n. 
Herodotus,  268. 
Herrick,  116. 
Holmes,  O.  W.,  370. 
Homer,  vii,  11,  68,  73,  74,  144,   184, 

185,  266,  352. 
Horace,  25, 112, 116, 117,  121,  137,  143, 

144,  244,  254. 
Hugo,  32,  45,  67,  73,  75, 79,  80,  91, 92, 

93,  95,  98, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 136, 

137,  180,  209,  243,  295,  307,  321,332, 

341,  377. 

Hugo,  Mme.,  105. 
Hurd,  Bishop,  227. 
Huret,  Jules,  293,  n. 
Hutchinson,  Colonel,  343. 
Huysmans,  314. 

James,  William,  ix,  53, 253,  264. 

Janin,  Jules,  91. 

Jeffrey,  4. 

Johnson,  Dr.  Samuel,  x,  96,  169,  227, 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


425 


230,  266,  303,  339,  340,  349,   370, 

371. 

Jonson,  Ben,  168. 
Joubert,  x,  8,  34-59,  64,  65, 69,  70,  71, 

74,  196, 199,  293,  312,  321,  331,  355, 

356,  375,  378, 381. 
Jouffroy,  315. 
Jouy,  121. 
Jurieu,  Mme.,  122. 
Jussieu,  145. 

Kant,  13,  43. 
Keats,  161,  375. 
Kotzebue,  352. 

La  Bruyere,  110,  111,  152. 

La  Fontaine,  20,  52  n.,  179, 183,  185. 

La  Harpe,  3,  11,  51,  85,  153. 

Lamarck,  102. 

Lamartine,  131,  136,  159,  160, 199,  208, 

233  341 

Lamb',  Charles,  36, 52, 170,  332. 
Lamennais.  102,  106, 107,  315. 
Lanson,    Gustave,    380    n.,  384,   385, 

386. 
La  Rochefoucauld,  53,  109,  110,  111. 

132,  152,  156,  173,  212. 
Lasserre,  Pierre,  381. 
Lazarus,  275. 
Le  Bossu,  65. 
Leconte  de  Lisle,  318. 
Leguay,  Pierre,  385  n. 
Leibnitz,  365. 
Lemaitre,  Jules,  52,  62,  64,  125  n.,  138, 

150,  302,  306,  311-316,  320,  321, 

323,  324,  326,  331,  350  n. 
Le  Maitre,  152. 
Lemercier,  2. 
Lenclos,  Ninon  de,  336. 
Leo  XIII,  334. 
Lerminier,  103  n. 
L4rins,  Saint  Vincent  de,  334. 
Lesage,  39,  86. 
Lessing,  302. 
Le  Tourneux,  177. 
Levallois,  J.,  105  n. 
Lincoln,  Abraham,  351. 
Livy,  57,  228,  267,  268. 
Longinus,  165,  352  n. 
Longueville,  Mme.  de,  84. 
Louis  XI,  233. 
Louis  XIV,  10,  15,  57,  68,  86,  89, 152, 

159,  182,  264,  338. 
Lncan,  57. 


Lucian,  185. 
Lucretius,  120, 260. 
Lycophron,  290. 

Machiavelli,  38. 

Macpherson,  266. 

Magnin,  158. 

Magny,  123,  140,  190. 

Maigron,  81  n, 

Maine,  due  du,  152. 

Maintenon,  Mme.  de,  152,  159. 

Maistre,  J.  de,  172. 

Malherbe,  325,  340. 

Malebranche,  172,  176,  228,  262. 

Mallarme',  304. 

Manzoni,  33. 

Marcus  Aurelius,  134,  241,  251,  276. 

Martial,  116. 

Martineau,  Harriet,  269. 

Mary  Magdalene,  275. 

Mary  Stuart,  278. 

Mathilde,  Princesse,  245. 

Maurras,  Charles,  368  n. 

Meilhan,  Senac  de,  149. 

Merlet,  G.,  2  n.,  61. 

Meissonier,  143. 

Michael  Angelo,  55. 

Michaud,  158. 

Michelet,  77,  181,  223,  231,  243. 

Mill,  John  Stuart,  224. 

Milsand,  272  n. 

Milton,  51,  68,  73,  74,  75,  213,  343. 

Mole",  49,  172. 

Moliere,89, 133, 134, 178, 183, 184,  191, 

213,  236,  263,  336. 
Montaigne,  89,  112,  113,  114,  115,  116, 

121,  172,  176,  184,  298,  316. 
Mont<$gut,  206. 
Montesquieu,  38. 
More,  Paul  E.,  357  n. 
Morley,  John,  134. 
Musset,  Alfred  de,  223,  224,  242, 270  n., 

341. 

Napoleon,  5,  8,  9,  12,  18,  129,  (Bona- 
parte) 167,  214,  215,  245,  384. 
Necker,  8. 
Nero,  273,  294. 
Newman,  Cardinal,  334,  388. 
Newton,  Sir  Isaac,  169. 
Nicolardot,  347. 
Nicole,  148,  158. 

Nisard,  87-95,  99,  136,  172,  325. 
Nordau,  Max,  378. 


426 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


Ohnet,  G.,  323. 
Ossian,  11,  12,  266. 

Paillet,  179. 

Palgrave   342. 

Pantasides,  101. 

Paris,  Paulin,  142. 

Patin,  Guy,  121. 

Pascal,  63,  85,  111,  112,  115,  127,  135, 

152,  174,  219,  239,  240,  241,  287  n., 

296, 299, 313,  315,  330,  331,  361,  367. 
Pater,  Walter,  118,  155,  321,  322,  323, 

350 

Paul,  Saint,  26,  27,  274,  275,  277. 
Peacock,  158. 
Peckins,  126. 
Pelagius,  274. 
Pellissier,  345  n. 
Pericles,  247,  264. 
Perrault,  172. 

Petit  de  Jnlleville,  32  n.,  80  n. 
Petrarch,  179. 
Petronius,  144,  160, 
Piron,  179,  182. 
Pius  IX,  272. 
Plato,  ix,  x,  34,  46,  52  n.,  54,  57,  211, 

253,  302,  355, 358,  371,  372,  376. 
Pliny,  185. 
Plutarch,  184. 
Poe,  172. 
Pollock,  352. 

Pope,  61,  65,  168, 169,  178. 
Pradon,  126. 
Provost,  Abbe",  86. 
Protagoras,  382,  383. 
Proudhon,  133. 
Prudhomme,  Sully,  27. 

Quinault,  172. 

Racine,  57,  63,  75,  126,  153,  175,  178, 

183,  212,  316,  338,  350. 
Raynal,  Paul  de,  8  n.,  34  n. 
Raynal,  Abb<$,  68. 
Recamier,  Mme.,  100,  159,  278. 
Renan,  6,  26,  27,  125  ».,  131,  140,  173, 

190,   216,  220,  243,  257-297,  304, 

305,  314,  315,  317,  319,  323, 339, 378, 

379. 

Renan,  Henriette,  286, 295. 
Retz,  Cardinal  de,  152. 
Reynolds,  Sir  Joshua,  339. 
Richardson,  171. 
Richelieu,  Cardinal  de,  154, 167. 


Rivarol,  347. 

Robespierre,  244,  296,  336. 

Robinson,  Crabb,  20. 

Ronsard,  88. 

Rothschild,  272. 

Rousseau,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10, 11, 14, 15,  22, 
30,  34,  41,  47,48,  49,  50,  53,  60,  61, 
64,  67,  68,  71,  81,  90,  91,  115,  164, 
169, 172,  252,  294, 302,  307, 310, 316, 
329,  336,  344,  345,  355,  356,357, 359. 

Ruskin,  70,  71,  76,  198  n. 

Saci,  Lemaitre  de,  148, 152. 

Sacy,  Sylvestre  de,  295  n. 

Sade,  Marquis  de,  210. 

Sainte-Beuve,  vii,  xi,  3,  14  n.,  17,  20, 
33,  35,  36,  38,  41,  45,  49,  50,  52  n,  62, 
68,  71,  73,  75,  80,  84,  86,  93,  94,  95, 
96,  97-188,  190,  200,  201.  202,  218, 
219,  220,  221,  223, 225, 228,  231,  232, 
246,  250,  255,  256,  257,  259,  263,  266, 
270,  273,  277,  278,  281,  287  n.,  292, 
300,  301,  303,  313,  317, 324, 331, 332, 
340,  347, 351,  354,  363, 364,  367, 369, 
379,  380,  384,  389,  390,  391,  392. 

Saint-Cyran,  152. 

Saint-Evremond,  10,  11,  154,  316. 

Saint-Hilaire,  Geoffrey,  325. 

Saint-Pierre,  B.  de,  48. 

Saint-Simon,  159. 

Saisset,  226. 

Salomon,  Ch.,  385  n. 

Sand,  G.,  242. 

Santayana,  G.,  346. 

Savary,  12. 

Scaliger,  325. 

Scherer,  73, 75, 131, 189-217, 218, 230, 
249,  272,  317. 

Schiller,  5,  20,  21. 

Schlegel,  A.  W.,  12,  16,  20,  22,  81,  172. 

Schopenhauer,  310,  311,  331,  333. 

Scott,  81,  82. 

Se"ailles,  283. 

Se'che1,  L.,  108  n. 

Senancour,  199. 

Seneca,  57. 

Shakespeare,  23,  75,  80,  162,  163,  180, 
183,  184,  185,212,  221,  222,  232,  248, 
273 

Shaw,  Bernard,  221. 

Shelley,  302. 

Siger  of  Brabant,  304. 

Simon,  172. 

Singlin,  148. 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


427 


Sismondi,  20,  81,  172. 

Socrates,  114,  345,  346,  358,  382,  383, 

386,  387. 
Solomon,  120. 

Sophocles,  23,  142,  164,  344. 
Southey,  338  n. 
Spenser,  35. 
Spinoza,  115«.,  120. 
Stael,  Mme.  de,  1-32, 45,  50, 58, 67, 69, 

80,  82,  83,  87,  88,  94,  96,  247,  355, 

356. 

Stendhal,  1,223,  232. 
Suard,  12, 13. 
Swift,  47. 

Tacitus  13,  57. 

Tailhad,    Laurent,  322. 

Taine,  r,'32,  92, 131, 137,  140, 147, 151, 
163,  180,  181,  183,  200,  217,  218- 
256,  277, 299, 300,  302, 306, 325,  333, 
334, 341,  342,  343,  344,  363, 371,  375. 

Tallemant,  179. 

Talleyrand,  9  n.,  12,  127. 

Tasso,  23,  24,  74,  312. 

Tennyson,  164,  199,281,  339,  342. 

Tertullian,  287  n. 

Texte,  32  n. 

Thackeray,  159,  170, 171,  177. 


Thierry,  Augustin,  77,  78,  295  n. 
Titian,  164. 
Tolstoy,  23,  353,  375. 
Tracy,  102. 

Vacherot,  226,  227. 

Varius,  351. 

Verlaine,  44,  314. 

Vernet,  Horace,  156,  177. 

Veron,  Dr.,  158. 

Vigny,  Alfred  de,  136,  172,  305. 

Villemain,  82,  85-87,  95,  96,  107, 
121  n. 

Vinet,  Alexandre,  102, 104,  190. 

Virgil,  45,  57,  68,  78,  351. 

Vogue",  de,  299,  302,  330. 

Voltaire,  14,  41,  62,  66,  67,  68,  85,  86, 
93,  97,  115  n.,  136,  159,  172,  179, 191, 
256,  268,  269,  322,  348,  375. 

Weiss,  206. 

Whitman,  Walt,  329. 

Wieland,  19. 

Wilson,  Bishop,  287. 

Wordsworth,  118,  172,  233,  285,  357. 

Zola,  141,  206,  207,  212,  259,  305,  306, 
307,  309,  314,  319,  320,  333,  376. 


CAMBRIDGE  .  MASSACHUSETTS 
U   .  S   .  A 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY,  LOS  ANGELES 

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This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


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